Yep, and if you're interested, Rubin doesn't send alerts directly to individuals. The alert stream alone (without full images) is enormous. There are a set of alert brokers who ingest, index, and add metadata before making the streams available in a consumable manner. You can find all the alert brokers here: https://rubinobservatory.org/for-scientists/data-products/al....
Each broker provides an interface with different strengths, and some are still scaling up as operations begin. And yes, most brokers support spatial queries (cone searches / RA-Dec filters), along with a host of other interesting parameters to filter by. You can check out the public Fink portal and API docs as an example (https://lsst.fink-portal.org, https://doc.lsst.fink-broker.org).
Rubin is still very early in survey operations, so only parts of the entire footprint have been observed so far. Depending on the region of interest, it may not have actually been observed yet (also, high quality difference image templates will take quite some time to build up). But it's very exciting to see how much data will be generated over the 10-year survey period, and once the observatory is running at full speed, the entire southern sky will be continuously re-imaged every three nights!
tocs3|1 day ago
Is there a way to search for a particular part of the sky?
pulsartwin|22 hours ago
Each broker provides an interface with different strengths, and some are still scaling up as operations begin. And yes, most brokers support spatial queries (cone searches / RA-Dec filters), along with a host of other interesting parameters to filter by. You can check out the public Fink portal and API docs as an example (https://lsst.fink-portal.org, https://doc.lsst.fink-broker.org).
Rubin is still very early in survey operations, so only parts of the entire footprint have been observed so far. Depending on the region of interest, it may not have actually been observed yet (also, high quality difference image templates will take quite some time to build up). But it's very exciting to see how much data will be generated over the 10-year survey period, and once the observatory is running at full speed, the entire southern sky will be continuously re-imaged every three nights!