Publications (73)
The JCMT Gould Belt Survey Complete Core Catalogue: Core mass function variations between nearby molecular clouds
Kate Pattle, James Di Francesco, Jenny Hatchell +14
We present a catalogue of dense cores identified in James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Survey SCUBA-2 observations of nearby star-forming clouds. We identified 2257 de…
A Gateway to Astronomical Image Processing: Vera C. RubinObservatory LSST Science Pipelines on AWS
Dino Bektesevic, Hsin-Fang Chiang, Kian-Tat Lim +6
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time, operated by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is a 10-year astronomical survey due to start operations in 2022 that will image half the sky every…
New Features in AST - a WCS Management and Manipulation Library
David Berry, Tim Jenness
Recent developments in the AST library are described, including a Python interface, support for the FITS-WCS "-TAB" system for storing tabular co-ordinate information, and extended…
SCUBA-2 Data Processing
Tim Jenness, David Berry, Ed Chapin +3
SCUBA-2 is the largest submillimetre array camera in the world and was commissioned on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) with two arrays towards the end of 2009. A period of…
ANTARES: Progress towards building a `Broker' of time-domain alerts
Abhijit Saha, Zhe Wang, Thomas Matheson +13
The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a joint effort of NOAO and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona to build pr…
ORAC-DR: A generic data reduction pipeline infrastructure
Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou
ORAC-DR is a general purpose data reduction pipeline system designed to be instrument and observatory agnostic. The pipeline works with instruments as varied as infrared integral f…
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance in 2018
Mark G. Allen, Patrick Dowler, Janet D. Evans +2
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) held its bi-annual Interoperability Meeting over two and half days prior to the ADASS 2018 conference. We provide a brief repo…
Rubin Science Platform on Google: the story so far
William O'Mullane, Frossie Economou, Flora Huang +16
We describe Rubin Observatory's experience with offering a data access facility (and associated services including our Science Platform) deployed on Google Cloud infrastructure as…
Implementing SIAv2 Over Rubin Observatory's Data Butler
Tim Jenness, Stelios Voutsinas, Gregory P. Dubois-Felsmann +1
The IVOA Simple Image Access version 2 protocol defines an easy way to provide community access to a collection of data. At the Vera C. Rubin Observatory we currently enable ObsTAP…
The CCAT Software System
Tim Jenness, Adam Brazier, Kevin Edwards +7
CCAT will be a 25-meter telescope for sub millimeter astronomy located at 5600m altitude on Cerro Chajnantor in northern Chile. CCAT will combine high sensitivity, a wide field of…
SCUBA-2: a 10,000 pixel submillimeter camera for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
Wayne Holland, Michael MacIntosh, Alasdair Fairley +30
SCUBA-2 is an innovative 10,000 pixel submillimeter camera due to be delivered to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in late 2006. The camera is expected to revolutionize submillime…
Machine Learning-based Brokers for Real-time Classification of the LSST Alert Stream
Gautham Narayan, Tayeb Zaidi, Monika D. Soraisam +20
The unprecedented volume and rate of transient events that will be discovered by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) demands that the astronomical community update its follo…
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Observations of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1)
Colin Orion Chandler, Pedro H. Bernardinelli, Mario JuriÄ +305
We report on the observation and measurement of astrometry, photometry, morphology, and activityof the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, also designated C/2025 N1 (ATLAS) with the NSF-…
The demise of the filesystem and multi level service architecture
William O'Mullane, Niall Gaffney, Frossie Economou +3
Many astronomy data centres still work on filesystems. Industry has moved on; current practice in computing infrastructure is to achieve Big Data scalability using object stores ra…
Software Architecture and System Design of Rubin Observatory
William O'Mullane, Frossie Economou, Kian-Tat Lim +8
Starting from a description of the Rubin Observatory Data Management System Architecture, and drawing on our experience with and involvement in a range of other projects including…
Variability-finding in Rubin Data Preview 1 with LSDB
Konstantin Malanchev, Melissa DeLucchi, Neven Caplar +56
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory recently released Data Preview 1 (DP1) in advance of the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will enable boundless discoveries in t…
The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: SCUBA-2 Data-Reduction Methods and Gaussian Source Recovery Analysis
Helen Kirk, Jennifer Hatchell, Doug Johnstone +17
The JCMT Gould Belt Survey was one of the first Legacy Surveys with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, mapping 47 square degrees of nearby (< 500 pc) molecular clouds in…
The SCUBA HAlf Degree Extragalactic Survey (SHADES) -- VI. 350 micron mapping of submillimetre galaxies
Kristen Coppin, Mark Halpern, Douglas Scott +24
A follow-up survey using the Submillimetre High-Angular Resolution Camera (SHARC-II) at 350 microns has been carried out to map the regions around several 850 micron-selected sourc…
SCUBA - A submillimetre camera operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
Wayne S. Holland, Colin R. Cunningham, Walter K. Gear +4
The Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) is one of a new generation of cameras designed to operate in the submillimetre waveband. The instrument has a wide wavelength…
Abstracting the storage and retrieval of image data at the LSST
Tim Jenness, James F. Bosch, Pim Schellart +3
Writing generic data processing pipelines requires that the algorithmic code does not ever have to know about data formats of files, or the locations of those files. At LSST we hav…
The SCUBA-2 Ambitious Sky Survey: a catalogue of beam-sized sources in the Galactic longitude range 120 to 140
Will Nettke, Douglas Scott, Andy Gibb +13
The SCUBA-2 Ambitious Sky Survey (SASSy) is composed of shallow 850-$\umu$m imaging using the Sub-millimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) on the James Clerk Maxwell Tele…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Butler and Pipeline Execution System
Tim Jenness, James F. Bosch, Nate B. Lust +6
The Rubin Observatory's Data Butler is designed to allow data file location and file formats to be abstracted away from the people writing the science pipeline algorithms. The Butl…
AST: A library for modelling and manipulating coordinate systems
David Berry, Rodney Warren-Smith, Tim Jenness
In view of increased interest in object-oriented systems for describing coordinate information, we present a description of the data model used by the Starlink AST library. AST pro…
Cold Dust in Hot Regions
Gopika Sreenilayam, Michel Fich, Peter Ade +12
We mapped five massive star forming regions with the SCUBA-2 camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). Temperature and column density maps are obtained from the SCUBA-2 4…
Data Movement Model for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory
Fabio Hernandez, Mark G. Beckett, Andrew Hanushevsky +6
The sky images captured nightly by the camera on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's telescope will be processed across facilities on three continents. Data acquisition will occur at t…
The Future of Astronomical Data Infrastructure: Meeting Report
Michael R. Blanton, Janet D. Evans, Dara Norman +69
The astronomical community is grappling with the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by modern telescopes, due to difficulties in reducing, accessing, analyzing, and…
SCUBA-2: iterative map-making with the Sub-Millimetre User Reduction Facility
Edward L. Chapin, David S. Berry, Andrew G. Gibb +5
The Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) is an instrument operating on the 15-m James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, nominally consisting of 5120 bolometers in each of t…
SCUBA: A common-user submillimetre camera operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
Wayne S. Holland, E. I. Robson, Walter K. Gear +10
SCUBA, the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array, built by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, is the most versatile and powerful of a new ge…
The LSST Data Management System
Mario JuriÄ, Jeffrey Kantor, K-T Lim +62
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a large-aperture, wide-field, ground-based survey system that will image the sky in six optical bands from 320 to 1050 nm, uniformly c…
A new HDF5 based raw data model for CCAT
Reinhold Schaaf, Adam Brazier, Tim Jenness +2
CCAT will be a large sub-millimeter telescope to be built near the ALMA site in northern Chile. The telescope must support a varied set of instrumentation including large format KI…
The Past, Present and Future of Astronomical Data Formats
Jessica Mink, Robert G. Mann, Robert Hanisch +5
The future of astronomy is inextricably entwined with the care and feeding of astronomical data products. Community standards such as FITS and NDF have been instrumental in the suc…
Extinction correction and on-sky calibration of SCUBA-2
Jessica T. Dempsey, Per Friberg, Tim Jenness +2
Commissioning of SCUBA-2 included a program of skydips and observations of calibration sources intended to be folded into regular observing as standard methods of source flux calib…
SONS: The JCMT legacy survey of debris discs in the submillimetre
Wayne S. Holland, Brenda C. Matthews, Grant M. Kennedy +32
Debris discs are evidence of the ongoing destructive collisions between planetesimals, and their presence around stars also suggests that planets exist in these systems. In this pa…
Map-making for large-format detector arrays on CCAT
Gaelen Marsden, Tim Jenness, Douglas Scott
CCAT is a large submillimetre telescope to be built near the ALMA site in northern Chile. A large-format KID camera, with up to 48,000 detectors at a single waveband sampled at abo…
Disentangling a group of lensed submm galaxies at z~2.9
Todd P. MacKenzie, Douglas Scott, Ian Smail +16
MS0451.60305 is a rich galaxy cluster whose strong lensing is particularly prominent at submm wavelengths. We combine new SCUBA-2 data with imaging from Herschel SPIRE and P…
Unveiling Dust-enshrouded Star Formation in the Early Universe: a Sub-mm Survey of the Hubble Deep Field
David Hughes, Steve Serjeant, James Dunlop +12
The advent of sensitive sub-mm array cameras now allows a proper census of dust-enshrouded massive star-formation in very distant galaxies, previously hidden activity to which even…
Adding Workflow Management Flexibility to LSST Pipelines Execution
Michelle Gower, Mikolaj Kowalik, Nate B. Lust +2
Data processing pipelines need to be executed at scales ranging from small runs up through large production data release runs resulting in millions of data products. As part of the…
Modern Python at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
Tim Jenness
The LSST software systems make extensive use of Python, with almost all of it initially being developed solely in Python 2. Since LSST will be commissioned when Python 2 is end-of-…
Reimplementing the Hierarchical Data System using HDF5
Tim Jenness
The Starlink Hierarchical Data System has been a very successful niche astronomy file format and library for over 30 years. Development of the library was frozen ten years ago when…
ANTARES: A Prototype Transient Broker System
Abhijit Saha, Thomas Matheson, Richard Snodgrass +5
The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a joint project of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Department of Computer Science a…
Learning from 25 years of the extensible N-Dimensional Data Format
Tim Jenness, David S. Berry, Malcolm J. Currie +8
The extensible N-Dimensional Data Format (NDF) was designed and developed in the late 1980s to provide a data model suitable for use in a variety of astronomy data processing appli…
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance in 2019
Mark A. Allen, Patrick Dowler, Janet D. Evans +5
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) held its bi-annual Interoperability Meetings in May 2019, and in October 2019 following the ADASS XXIX conference. We provide…
Using Felis to Represent the Semantics and Metadata of Astronomical Data Catalogs
Jeremy McCormick, Gregory P. Dubois-Felsmann, Andrei Salnikov +2
The Data Management team of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has developed a data description language and toolset, Felis, for defining the semantics and metadata of its public-facing…
Multi-Generational Star Formation in L1551
Gerald H. Moriarty-Schieven, Doug Johnstone, John Bally +1
The L1551 molecular cloud contains two small clusters of Class 0 and I protostars, as well as a halo of more evolved Class II and III YSOs, indicating a current and at least one pa…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Preview 1
Vera C Rubin Observatory Team, Tatiana Acero Cuellar, Emily Acosta +325
We present Rubin Data Preview 1 DP1, the first data from the NSF DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory, comprising raw and calibrated single epoch images, coadds, difference images, detecti…
Towards the automated reduction and calibration of SCUBA data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
Tim Jenness, Jason A. Stevens, Elese N. Archibald +3
The Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) instrument has been operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) since 1997. The data archive is now sufficiently lar…
Enabling Early Transient Discovery in LSST via Difference Imaging with DECam
Yize Dong, Kaylee de Soto, V. Ashley Villar +58
We present SLIDE, a pipeline that enables transient discovery in data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), using archival images from the Da…
Integrating the PanDA Workload Management System with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory
Edward Karavakis, Wen Guan, Zhaoyu Yang +16
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will produce an unprecedented astronomical data set for studies of the deep and dynamic universe. Its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will imag…
Learning from FITS: Limitations in use in modern astronomical research
Brian Thomas, Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou +35
The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easil…
An Overview of the LSST Image Processing Pipelines
James Bosch, Yusra AlSayyad, Robert Armstrong +31
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an ambitious astronomical survey with a similarly ambitious Data Management component. Data Management for LSST includes processing on…
The LSST Data Processing Software Stack: Summer 2015 Release
Tim Jenness
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an 8-m optical ground-based telescope being constructed on Cerro Pachon in Chile. LSST will survey half the sky every few nights in si…
Observatory/data centre partnerships and the VO-centric archive: The JCMT Science Archive experience
Frossie Economou, Severin Gaudet, Tim Jenness +10
We present, as a case study, a description of the partnership between an observatory (JCMT) and a data centre (CADC) that led to the development of the JCMT Science Archive (JSA).…
The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
The Astropy Collaboration, Adrian M. Price-Whelan, Pey Lian Lim +133
The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical communit…
The General Single-Dish Data Format: A Retrospective
Tim Jenness, Elizabeth B. Stobie, Ronald J. Maddalena +5
The General Single-Dish Data format (GSDD) was developed in the mid-1980s as a data model to support centimeter, millimeter and submillimeter instrumentation at NRAO, JCMT, the Uni…
Automated reduction of submillimetre single-dish heterodyne data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope using ORAC-DR
Tim Jenness, Malcolm J. Currie, Remo P. J. Tilanus +4
With the advent of modern multi-detector heterodyne instruments that can result in observations generating thousands of spectra per minute it is no longer feasible to reduce these…
Overview of the distributed image processing infrastructure to produce the Legacy Survey of Space and Time
Fabio Hernandez, George Beckett, Peter Clark +9
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is preparing to execute the most ambitious astronomical survey ever attempted, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Currently the final phase o…
A new era of wide-field submillimetre imaging: on-sky performance of SCUBA-2
Jessica T. Dempsey, Wayne S. Holland, Antonio Chrysostomou +15
SCUBA-2 is the largest submillimetre wide-field bolometric camera ever built. This 43 square arc-minute field-of-view instrument operates at two wavelengths (850 and 450 microns) a…
A General Catalogue of Molecular Hydrogen Emission-Line Objects (MHOs) in Outflows from Young Stars
Christopher J. Davis, Ryan Gell, Tigran Khanzadyan +2
We present a catalogue of Molecular Hydrogen emission-line Objects (MHOs) in outflows from young stars, most of which are embedded. All objects are identified in the near-infrared…
An overview of the planned CCAT software system
Tim Jenness, Martin C. Shepherd, Reinhold Schaaf +7
CCAT will be a 25m diameter sub-millimeter telescope capable of operating in the 0.2 to 2.1mm wavelength range. It will be located at an altitude of 5600m on Cerro Chajnantor in no…
Removing sky contributions from SCUBA data
Tim Jenness, John F. Lightfoot, Wayne S. Holland
The Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) is a new continuum camera operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. It consists of two array…
A Pilot Study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey
Todd Mackenzie, Filiberto G. Braglia, Andy G. Gibb +30
We have carried out a pilot study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey, SASSy, a wide and shallow mapping project at 850 microns, designed to find rare objects, both Galactic and extra…
Porting the LSST Data Management Pipeline Software to Python 3
Tim Jenness
The LSST data management science pipelines software consists of more than 100,000 lines of Python 2 code. LSST operations will begin after support for Python 2 has been dropped by…
Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
The Astropy Collaboration, Thomas P. Robitaille, Erik J. Tollerud +42
We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core astronomy-related functionality to the com…
Data management and execution systems for the Rubin Observatory Science Pipelines
Nate B. Lust, Tim Jenness, James F. Bosch +7
We present the Rubin Observatory system for data storage/retrieval and pipelined code execution. The layer for data storage and retrieval is named the Butler. It consists of a rela…
Map-making for the Next Generation of Ground-based Submillimeter Instruments
Gaelen Marsden, Adam Brazier, Tim Jenness +2
Current ground-based submillimeter instruments (e.g. SCUBA-2, SHARC-2 and LABOCA) have hundreds to thousands of detectors, sampled at tens to hundreds of hertz, generating up to hu…
The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: First results from SCUBA-2 observations of the Cepheus Flare Region
Kate Pattle, Derek Ward-Thompson, Jason M. Kirk +57
We present observations of the Cepheus Flare obtained as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Legacy Survey (GBLS) with the SCUBA-2 instrument. We produce a…
Significant problems in FITS limit its use in modern astronomical research
Brian Thomas, Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou +11
The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easil…
LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
Željko IveziÄ, Steven M. Kahn, J. Anthony Tyson +310
(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a sin…
The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: First results from the Corona Australis molecular cloud and evidence of variable dust emissivity indices in the Coronet region
Kate Pattle, David Bresnahan, Derek Ward-Thompson +47
We present 450m and 850m James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) observations of the Corona Australis (CrA) molecular cloud taken as part of the JCMT Gould Belt Legacy Survey…
The VO: A powerful tool for global astronomy
Christophe Arviset, Mark Allen, Alessandra Aloisi +14
Since its inception in the early 2000, the Virtual Observatory (VO), developed as a collaboration of many national and international projects, has become a major factor in the disc…
Transient Alert Follow-up Planned for CCAT
Tim Jenness
CCAT is a sub-millimeter telescope to be built on Cerro Chajnantor in Chile near the ALMA site. The remote location means that all observing will be done by remote observers with t…
Spectroscopic Analysis in the Virtual Observatory Environment with SPLAT-VO
Petr Skoda, Peter W. Draper, Margarida Castro Neves +2
SPLAT-VO is a powerful graphical tool for displaying, comparing, modifying and analyzing astronomical spectra, as well as searching and retrieving spectra from services around the…
SCUBA-2: on-sky calibration using submillimetre standard sources
Jessica T. Dempsey, Per Friberg, Tim Jenness +11
SCUBA-2 is a 10000-bolometer submillimetre camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The instrument commissioning was completed in September 2011, and full science operat…