General:
- New leadership structure:
- SSG co-chair: Chenoa Tremblay
VLASS News:
- Observing and data processing status: Amy Kimball and Mark Lacy
- Epoch 3.2 status Observing and Processing
- 22% observed, 9% of QL images available.
- Better communication on Epoch 3.2 start requested (for epoch 4)
- Email announcement to interested stakeholders?
- Difficult to know when a particular tile has been observed (Greg Sivakoff) - how could we improve this for Epoch 4?
- Archive interface has been explored, but some challenges remain
- Field centers of VLASS observations may not be archived correctly
- COSMIC has an internal solution for this issue using the “multi-cast” VLA information
- Public data stream version would be useful for Epoch 4
- Impacts of the May solar storm
- Assessing - higher phase noise led to noticeably reduced dynamic range and ~10% apparent flux loss for sources in 2 affected tiles. May be recoverable with self-calibration in SE.
- Image effects:
- Poorer PSF due to large residual phase errors
- Dynamic range effects
- SE processing expected to fix it; some concerns by the SSG as to whether this will prove to be true. To be tested (when?) and re-observed if needed.
- Check-in on this next month
- Questions
- Impacts on polarimetry?
- Possibly; further discussion needed.
- Atmospheric science opportunities?
- VCSS was more strongly affected than VLASS (50-60 deg from the sun even . . . )
- Open question
- Other processing updates
- Science highlights:
- Impact of Visitor Center VLASS video at recent visit - Chenoa
- Can we get this video on youtube for the VLASS webpage?
- Video includes interview with VLASS project staff, is currently projected on the wall at the visitor center
- Chenoa will reach out to EPO about this
- Is this the visitor site VLASS video (linked by Juergen)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXQEZQxN0oo
- Erik Carlson’s memo on the VLASS SE pipeline was recently published (memo #20) https://library.nrao.edu/public/memos/vla/vlass/VLASS_020.pdf
Outreach ideas:
- AAS Education & Professional Development (EPD) Mini-Grant Program? (https://aas.org/posts/news/2024/04/request-letters-intent-2025-aas-epd-mini-grant-program)
- Next deadline in may 2025
- Events:
- Conference updates?
- Summer AAS - Yjan Gordon is organizing a VLASS meet-up
- Recent GPU gridder updates at NRAO conference in Charlottesville; promising!
- Useful input for VLASS GPU processing testing
- https://github.com/ARDG-NRAO/LibRA (GitHub Library for GPU gridder, you can run on your own data)
- VLASS Epoch 4
- Community review planned for late summer/early fall
- Greg: “most people don’t understand that we have an arcsecond resolution survey of the sky” . . . more marketing needed to non-radio astronomer community
- Talk: “The VLASS Transient Pipeline” - Dillon Dong (to be rescheduled)
- Overview:
- Progress on Dillon’s real-time transient pipeline is underway
- Transient candidates posted to website
- Greg Sivakoff’s institution is supporting computing/processing
- Summer student will be working on the pipeline
- Source classes of interest? Have a filter for identifying sources of interest? Dillon can send you automated updates when new sources are identified
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Future meetings: (subject to change; check your email/Slack for updates)
- SSG: July 1 (tentative) at 1pm EDT / 11am MDT / 17:00 UTC
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Reference material:
- Terms of reference document: pdf
- VLASS Slack workspace and SSG channel (contact Bryan Gaensler)
- Confluence page