Skyalert Project

CACR is pleased to announce an award of $479,100 from the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure for the Skyalert project. Skyalert is an event-driven system to understand and disseminate events that are created from real-time sensors, such as astronomical telescopes that repeatedly scan the sky for change. The number of these astronomical transient detections will grow enormously over the next few years, and rapid follow-up observation will be the key to discovery. This will come from big observatories, small college observatories, and amateur astronomers. Skyalert delivers events from the Catalina Real Time Survey and the NASA SWIFT and Fermi observatories, as well as a dozen other projects that detect astronomical transients. Examples of such transients include supernovae, cataclysmic variables, gamma-ray bursts, blazar eruption, planetary microlensing, and other exciting astrophysics.

Skyalert delivers events in real time via email, Twitter, instant message, and other protocols to observatories that can do rapid follow-up — some completely automatically with no human in the loop. Other event-driven actions can include fetching data to build a data portfolio, and running machine-learning algorithms and classification rules to make better automatic decisions. The intention is for automated systems to make real-time intelligent decisions. Skyalert uses an international standard, VOEvent, enabling participation in the global event infrastructure, exchanging events with other event brokers, such as NASA’s GCN.