Special Topics in Astrophysics: Astrophysical Data Analysis with the Rubin Observatory

Catalog description

The Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time is surveying the southern sky every few nights, delivering a real-time alert stream of millions of nightly objects, and catalogs of tens of billions of stars and galaxies. This hands-on seminar follows the path from telescope to science: how photons become calibrated images, how images become catalogs - calibration, deblending, and the selection functions that shape every result - and how catalogs and the alert stream yield measurements of the transient sky, the Milky Way, galaxies, gravitational lensing, and cosmology. Students will learn core astrophysics concepts and work directly with early Rubin data to enable cutting-edge analyses, confronting the data challenges and systematics that dominate survey science.