Abstract
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be an 8.4m optical survey telescope sited in Chile and capable of imaging the entire sky twice a week. The data rate of approximately 15TB per night and the requirements to both issue alerts on transient sources within 60 seconds of observing and create annual data releases means that automated data management systems and data processing pipelines are a key deliverable of the LSST construction project. The LSST data management software has been in development since 2004 and is based on a C++ core with a Python control layer. The software consists of nearly a quarter of a million lines of code covering the system from fundamental WCS and table libraries to pipeline environments and distributed process execution. The Astropy project began in 2011 as an attempt to bring together disparate open source Python projects and build a core standard infrastructure that can be used and built upon by the astronomy community. This project has been phenomenally successful in the years since it has begun and has grown to be the de facto standard for Python software in astronomy. Astropy brings with it considerable expectations from the community on how astronomy Python software should be developed and it is clear that by the time LSST is fully operational in the 2020s many of the prospective users of the LSST software stack will expect it to be fully interoperable with Astropy. In this paper we describe the overlap between the LSST science pipeline software and Astropy software and investigate areas where the LSST software provides new functionality. We also discuss the possibilities of re-engineering the LSST science pipeline software to build upon Astropy, including the option of contributing affliated packages.
Highlights
One major component of the Data Management system[1] for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)[2,3,4] is a pair of software pipelines capable of reducing LSST images to catalogs, one to produce alerts while observing and the other to produce data releases at regular intervals
The LSST data processing pipeline software has been in development as an open source project since 200418–20 and during these 12 years of development much has changed in the Python, C++ and astronomy software world
As with other software developed in the early 2000s, such as CASA,[21] the LSST science pipeline software is based on a C++ core with a Python control layer, where for LSST the Python/C++ interface layer is handled via SWIG22 bindings
Summary
One major component of the Data Management system[1] for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)[2,3,4] is a pair of software pipelines capable of reducing LSST images to catalogs, one to produce alerts while observing and the other to produce data releases at regular intervals. While algorithmically advanced pipelines and public catalog releases have become the norm for large surveys over the past 20 years, LSST’s will be the first for which the software must be accessible to and usable by scientists outside the pipeline team. The LSST data processing pipeline software has been in development as an open source project since 200418–20 and during these 12 years of development much has changed in the Python, C++ and astronomy software world
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