Observations and status#

Important

Rubin Observatory is still in an early operations phase.

The key objective is to improve the image quality and survey efficiency in order to start the ten-year LSST survey. The amount of science-grade data collected during this early phase will vary. For the general timeline during this phase, read more about the Early Science Program.

LSSTCam#

All observations were obtained with the LSST Camera (LSSTCam). Find a description, key numbers, filter bandpasses, and more in the LSSTCam documentation.

Citation: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory & NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (2025); The LSST Camera (LSSTCam) DOI Logo https://doi.org/10.71929/rubin/2571927

Survey strategy#

Information about the strategy and cadence for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time can be found at survey-strategy.lsst.io.

Nightly projection#

The projected Rubin schedule can be obtained via ObsLocTAP programatically or with the browser-based viewer. A tutorial notebook for the Rubin Schedule Viewer is available.

Nightly reports#

Automated per-night reports are publicly available as scheduler viewer reports.

In the future, observational metadata will be available as queryable tables and documented under Data products.

Template coverage#

During early Alert Production, templates (and thus alerts) primarily exist in the Deep Drilling Fields.

As of February 2026, templates had been deployed in Alert Production for the fields listed in the table below. All of these are DDFs except the M49 (Virgo) field, which was part of the Rubin First Look images.

DDF templates#

Name

Coordinates

Filters

COSMOS

150.11, 2.23

ugrizy

ECDFS

52.98, -28.12 deg

riz

ELAIS-S1

9.45, -44.02 deg

griz

EDFS_a

58.9, -49.32 deg

griz

EDFS_b

63.6, -47.6 deg

griz

XMM-LSS

35.57, -4.82 deg

iz

M49 (Virgo)

187.4, +8 deg

ugri

Additional template images will be generated incrementally during the early science phase, and information about template regions will be added here. Details are available in Template generation.

Important

Tools for visualizing the current template holdings are under development.

Alert stream status#

A live dashboard showing alert processing over the last twelve hours is available at ls.st/alert-stream-status.