Invitation to a Workshop on LSST Observing Cadences

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will host a workshop on optimizing LSST deployment during the week of 11 August 2014; though the exact dates have not yet been decided, the length will be approximately two days. This workshop will be held in Tucson, Arizona, in coordination with the LSST Joint Technical Meeting during the same week, and attendees will be welcome at the JTM venue as well. For a description of the workshop motivation and notional plan, see the Observing Cadences Workshop homepage.

This meeting will be the first of several such workshops, held approximately every two years, or more frequently if needed, oriented toward broadening the scientific participation in developing the LSST scheduler and the optimization criteria for its observing cadence. The focus of this workshop will be science-­driven cadence merit functions.

Future workshops will evaluate cadences from candidate scheduling algorithms and dithering strategies, will work on the approaches to establishing cadence requirements with respect to merit functions, and will work on the optimization of the scheduler.

In order to help us scale the facilities and the program, persons who would like to participate in the August 2014 workshop are requested to communicate their interest by 15 March 2014 by email.