Lasair: A UK Alert Stream Broker

Lasair is being developed by The University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, and Oxford University to serve transient alerts from the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to the astronomical community. Lasair (pronounced ‘L-AH-s-uh-r’) means flame or flash in Scots and Irish gaelic. To prototype functionality needed to process transient event alerts from LSST, Lasair has been processing and serving data from the public stream of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which is releasing a transient alert stream in a format similar to that envisaged for LSST. We thank ZTF for access to this valuable public data stream.

If you make use of Lasair in any of your work, please remember to cite our paper: R.D.Williams et. al., Enabling science from the Rubin alert stream with Lasair, RAS Techniques and Instruments, 3,1, 362 (2024).

To start using Lasair to filter the deluge of alerts:

Start

• Quick Start
• Videos
• Lasair Cookbook

The following is about the astronomical science enabled by Lasair:

About Lasair

• About Lasair
• How is Lasair Different?
• The Lasair approach
• How Lasair Works
• Scientific goals of Lasair

Please start here to discover the key ideas of Lasair:

Lasair Concepts

• Lasair Concepts

Lasair’s core features are described in more detail here:

Core Functions

• Sky Search
• Sherlock (Sky Context)
• Make a Lasair Filter
• Lasair’s Lightcurve Features
• Watchlists
• Watchmaps (Sky Regions)
• Multimessenger Counterparts
• Lasair API Client
• Curl and Get
• Python Notebooks
• Alert Streams
• Making an Annotator

More Information

• Lasair account
• Questions and Answers
• Contact Us
• Lasair Ingestion Status
• Acknowledgements