2025-07-11 –, Ballroom
After two decades of planning, Rubin Observatory is finally observing the sky. Built to image the entire southern hemisphere every few nights with a 3.2-gigapixel camera, Rubin will produce a time-lapse of the Universe, revealing moving asteroids, pulsing stars, supernovae, and rare transients that you only catch if you're always watching.
In this talk, I'll share the “first look” images from Rubin Observatory as well as what it took to get here: from scalable algorithms to infrastructure that moves data from a mountaintop in Chile to scientists around the world in seconds. I'll reflect on what we learned building the data management system in Python over the years, including stories of choices that impacted scalability, interfaces, and maintainability. Rubin Observatory is here. And it's for you.
Yusra AlSayyad is the Deputy Associate Director of the Data Management subsystem for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, where she coordinates for the Science Pipelines and Campaign Management teams, and still writes Python daily. She is a researcher at Princeton University and has been part of Rubin’s data management effort since 2012. She holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington and a master’s in computer science. Before grad school, she worked in information management for a consulting firm specializing in turnaround and restructuring. With Rubin soon entering survey operations, she brings lessons from over a decade of building scientific Python infrastructure for an observatory, astronomers, and the broader research community.