Introduction to the Transients and Variable Star Science Collaboration

Our group is a large, diverse collaboration, which, includes 10+ subgroups and Task Forces with different science interests and expertise in the transient sky science. You can find the most up to date information about each subgroup at the TVS website.

Membership of TVS is open to all members of the US and Chilean astronomical communities, and to the international astronomical community through the Rubin In-Kind Program.

The collaboration is organized as follows:

The main contacts for each subgroup and Task Force can be found on the TVS website. Please reach out to the main contact of your primary and secondary subgroups to familiarize yourself with the current activities of the subgroup. If you are interested in a science topic that does not yet have a subgroup or a main contact yet, and you want to jumpstart your TVS participation by volunteering that would be great! Let us know!

All TVS members are encouraged to attend the regular TVS telecons, and attendance is expected for subgroup coordinators, so that they are able to keep their subgroups up to date with TVS activities and the LSST Project as a whole. These telecons are held every other Tuesday at 9am PDT / noon EDT / 6pm CEST.

LSST uses community.lsst.org and Slack as our primary communication tools. All members are given access to these platforms when they join. There is a TVS channel (#tvs) on the LSST Slack team, with additional channels for the topical subgroups. There is a community.lsst.org TVS channel for our collaboration. There is also a channel for cross-collaboration discussions; private conversations that should only be visible to some of the TVS collaboration should be done by email.