An Overview of the LSST Image Processing Pipelines

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the LSST image processing pipelines, detailing their interactions and roles in managing vast astronomical data for transient detection, cataloging, and photometry over a decade.

Contribution

It offers a high-level summary of the LSST data processing pipelines and emphasizes the interactions among algorithms rather than individual details.

Findings

Pipelines process data on nightly and yearly cadences.

They generate transient alerts, deep sky catalogs, and light-curves.

Algorithms interact in complex ways to handle large-scale astronomical data.

Abstract

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 both nightly and yearly cadences to generate transient alerts, deep catalogs of the static sky, and forced photometry light-curves for billions of objects at hundreds of epochs, spanning at least a decade. The algorithms running in these pipelines are individually sophisticated and interact in subtle ways. This paper provides an overview of those pipelines, focusing more on those interactions than the details of any individual algorithm.