Looking for feedback on concept of a new Fornax crossmatch notebook

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Hi folks, I am working on a rough draft of a notebook demonstrating an in-memory cross-match using LSDB on the Fornax Science Console here on github. It has the very basic framework of 1. taking a catalog NOT from the cloud (in this case using astroquery), 2. converting it to HATS format, and 3. cross-matching it with a cloud catalog. Before I go further down this rabbit hole, I want to confirm the niche that this notebook should fill.

  1. What specific goals do we want to demonstrate that aren’t already shown by an existing Fornax and/or LSDB notebook?

  2. Do both catalogs need to be user-supplied, or is it okay to use one cloud catalog? (personally I think doing one cloud catalog and one user catalog nicely demonstrates both options in one place)

  3. If this is to go in the Fornax demo notebooks repo, does it need to have a science case, or is it sufficient to demonstrate functionality? I have some thoughts about a potential science case at the end of the notebook but would welcome any thoughts.

  4. Are there any other constraints that I’m missing here?

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Hi @zclaytor, good questions! I think one user-supplied catalog and one cloud catalog would be a good mix. Can you tell us more about your use case? We strongly recommend that you start with a science use case for a few reasons. Basic data access and cross matching using lsdb is covered by the existing ztf_ps1_crossmatch.md notebook so it sounds like the one you’re describing here may have a lot of overlap and it would be good to think through what can set it apart. Take a look at our repo onboarding document at fornax-demo-notebooks/repo-onboarding.pdf at main · nasa-fornax/fornax-demo-notebooks · GitHub. It covers things like the purpose of the repo and some requirements and recommendations for new notebooks. Let us know what you think after considering your new notebook from those perspectives and we can talk through it further from there.

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I forgot to mention that our light curve collector notebook does this very thing for both PanSTARRS and ZTF. It gets coordinates for a list of user supplied targets, turns it into an in memory hats catalog, and cross matches.