13 April, 2016

Elahe presented a recap of her work on LSST scheduling optimization, updates since the 2015  All Hands Meeting, and plans for future investigations.

Action items: 

• Address Elahe's questions via email where possible. 
• Start a community thread about "how to choose a filter"; AndyC will consolidate the thread and make some recommendations to Elahe.  (see https://community.lsst.org/t/how-do-we-determine-when-the-scheduler-should-change-filters/683)
• Start a community thread about "what are good weather-based features" – for example, should we combine airmass, seeing, cloud cover, and sky brightness into a single SNR number and use this? Separating features where they lead to different kinds of behavior is desireable (i.e. if skybrightness makes you change filter, while cloudiness makes you move the telescope .. and you have a reason to think you'd act differently based on these different pieces of information .. SNR, in different filters, for example, could still drive you to the same conclusion as having these pieces of information separately). https://community.lsst.org/t/what-weather-based-features-should-the-scheduler-consider/684
• Start a community thread about "are there different kinds of nights?" – do you try to choose your actions differently if the moon is up or the night is longer or if it's very cloudy? What kind of granularity on these differences is useful? https://community.lsst.org/t/are-there-different-kinds-of-nights-that-the-scheduler-should-consider/685