I spent the week in Tucson Arizona for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) annual meeting. They had a special focus meeting on deblending which is particularly relevant for me. It was great to see the work being done on the pipeline deblender SCARLETT (Melchior et al. 2018 – https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.10157).
My work on deblending is concentrating on more expensive and robust methods that could not be applied in the pipeline which must be run essentially every night on incoming data. It was clear that other methods must be developed for each given science case. There will have to be more work on resolved objects for instance. The real challenge is that the objects are not point sources. It is this combination of resolved and confused images that makes deblending such a challenge.
The conference was also a chance to find out more about the project as a whole including updates on the construction. The telescope is really taking shape and images from the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón and it is extremely exciting to see all the work, by scientists and engineers, going into the project’s success.