slide-lsst 0.2.0

Image subtraction package for LSST using DECam templates

SLIDE: Subtracting LSST Images with DECam Exposures

NOTE: Major changes have been implemented since August 12, 2025. A new option fast_mode has been added to the perform_image_subtraction function, which makes image subtraction much faster and more reliable. Please git pull to get updates and check example.ipynb for an example.

WARNING: SLIDE is designed for use on the Rubin Science Platform (RSP). It will not work on local installations!

SLIDE performs image subtraction on LSST data using DECam templates. It is designed to run directly on the Rubin Science Platform (RSP). SLIDE can automatically retrieve templates from DES DR2 or DECaLS DR9. Users may also supply custom DECam templates. An example of image subtraction made by SLIDE is shown below.

We thank Griffin Hosseinzadeh for providing the PyZOGY image subtraction example: https://github.com/griffin-h/image_subtraction

Citation

If you use this package in your research, please cite:

Dong et al. (2025), "Enabling Early Transient Discovery in LSST via Difference Imaging with DECam", arXiv:2507.22156

Installation

Note: On RSP, you will need to activate the LSST environment first.

# Activate LSST environment on RSP
conda activate lsst-scipipe-10.0.0
setup lsst_distrib

Prerequisites

Most dependencies of this package has been installed on RSP. If you miss any packages, you can install them as following:

pip install --user reproject

PyZOGY

This package depends on PyZOGY for image subtraction (https://github.com/dguevel/PyZOGY/tree/master):

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/dguevel/PyZOGY.git

Install SLIDE (you will need to install SLIDE on RSP)

Option 1: Install from GitHub

git clone https://github.com/yizedong/SLIDE.git
cd SLIDE
pip install --user -e .

Option 2: Install from PyPI

pip install --user slide-lsst

Documentation

For detailed usage examples, see the example.ipynb notebook included in the package.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.