Lasair is being developed by The University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, and Oxford University to serve transient alerts from the Vera Rubin Observatory’s ”Legacy Survey of Space and Time’ (LSST) to the astronomical community. Lasair (pronounced ‘L-AH-s-uh-r’) means flame or flash in Scots and Irish Gaelic.
The Rubin Observatory provides unprecedented temporal resolution, depth and uniform photometry over an entire hemisphere and a real-time stream of alerts from the ever-changing sky. While processing the transient alert stream, Lasair adds much value to each alert, including computing lightcurve feature metrics and adding contextual information for the transient (via the Sherlock Contextual Classifier). Beyond this, the Lasair broker enables users to filter, query, and manipulate the alerts to extract the full scientific potential from the transient alert stream.
Main technical characteristics
LSST
- FOV: 9.6 square degrees
- Survey coverage: ~18,000 square degrees coverage of the southern hemisphere
- Single shot depths: u 23.8, g 24.5, r 24.03, i 23.41, z 22.74, y 22.96
- Alert Stream: ~10 million transient alerts per night
Website: https://lasair-ztf.lsst.ac.uk