10 Million Alerts a Night: How to Ride the Rubin Observatory Firehose
🚀 Overview
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to flood astronomy with more data than ever before. Every clear night, its 3.2-gigapixel camera scans the sky, identifying everything that moves, brightens, or shifts.
Want to be part of it? Here’s how.
🔎 Step 1: Tap into the Firehose (Via Brokers)
Rubin’s alert stream generates up to 10 million transient events every night — too much for individuals to filter directly. That’s where community brokers come in.
These services subscribe to the Rubin firehose and let you build filters for the kinds of events you want to track.
✅ Tools to Get Started:
🔗 ALeRCE Broker Signup – real-time alert filtering from Chilean researchers
🔗 Lasair UK Broker – create custom filters, export watchlists
🔧 Build Your Own Filters:
Focus your alerts on:
“Moving fast” objects (near-Earth candidates) “Brightening suddenly” (transients or novae) “Near my sky tonight” (local observing window)
Both platforms allow alerts to be sent via email, API, or web dashboard.
🧭 Step 2: Select & Track a Candidate
Once a moving object shows up in your filtered feed:
Confirm it hasn’t already been followed up. 🔗 Check MPC’s NEO Confirmation Page Get the ephemerides (predicted sky path):
🔗 Use JPL Horizons System Check if it’s visible from your location tonight
🔗 Use Stellarium Web to simulate the sky
🛰 Step 3: Observe & Submit Your Data
Got clear skies and a telescope? You can now record astrometry (position measurements) and submit your observations.
To Do:
Apply for a Minor Planet Center (MPC) Observatory Code 🔗 Get Your Code Here Format your data using ADES (Astrometry Data Exchange Standard)
🔗 ADES Format Documentation Submit your measurements to the MPC for official inclusion
🔗 Submit Observations
🧠 What You’re Helping Track
Your observations help “nail the orbits” of objects the Rubin system detects:
Object Type/Projected Discoveries
Main-belt asteroids – 5+ million
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) -100,000+
Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) -Thousands
Jupiter Trojans -Thousands
🎯 Many will require you — the amateur — to confirm and refine.
🛠 Your Toolkit
Purpose/Tool
Alert Filtering
Orbital Confirmation
Ephemeris Lookup
Local Visibility Check
Submission + Formatting
Observatory Registration
📍 Final Thoughts
The Rubin Observatory is the radar sweep—but it’s not complete without ground-level eyes.
Your telescope, your filter, your follow-up observation—that’s how we turn unknown blips into mapped objects with known trajectories.
💥 This is the democratization of planetary defense.
🔗 Explore the Full Rubin Practice Guide
🔬 Join ALeRCE’s citizen science flow
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