•
Download the new Transient Events Application at the iTunes Store!
The heavens are much more dynamic than most people realize. Every night stars and galaxies vary in brightness and comets move through our solar system. The astronomy community has survey telescopes monitoring the sky on a regular basis looking for objects which vary in brightness or position in the night sky. The images from these telescopes are analyzed automatically and variable objects are published through CACR’s Skyalert system. Transient Events currently receives events from CACR’s Catalina Real-Time Survey (CRTS), with more surveys to be added in the future. Transient Events provides an easy-to-use application to monitor these events. (Read more about the features of the Transient Events iPhone App)
The real-time event discovery, processing, and dissemination of events is made possible by NASA under grant NNG05GF22G, and by the NSF under grants AST-0909182 (CRTS) and OCI-0915473 (Skyalert). Creation of the Transient Events application was funded by the the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
•
Skyalert.org will be distributing Santa Sighting Events via Twitter and Facebook over 24 hours from the morning of Dec 24, 2009. Where in the universe will Santa be next?
The stream will be broadcast live at http://twitter.com/skyalert with the tag #SantaAlert, at http://skyalert.org/santa, and also through the Skyalert page on Facebook. Tell your friends!
SkyAlert collects and distributes reports of astronomical transients in near-real time. When looking deeply and frequently, the sky is full of explosions and movement. Examples of such transients include Supernovae, Cataclysmic Variables, Gamma-ray Bursts, and Blazar Eruption, and the discovery rate of such transients is increasing rapidly as new surveys come online. For further information about Skyalert visit http://www.skyalert.org.
•
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.
•
“Real-Time Astronomy with Skyalert”
Roy Williams,
Center for Advanced Computing Research, Caltech
CS Lunch Bunch
Tuesday, April 21st
12:00 – 1:00pm
74 Jorgensen
~OR~
IPAC Colloquium
Wednesday, April 22nd
12:00 – 1:00pm
Morrisroe Large Conference Room, IPAC
There is a waterfall coming of astronomical surveys that discover change in the sky, and the data rates are of course exponentiating. Such transient events may be supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, cataclysmic variables, blazar eruptions, etc. To understand the astrophysics of these rapid followup observation is needed, and as rates increase, decisions will of necessity be made by automated systems. I will present a prototype of such a system.
More information about Skyalert: http://www.skyalert.org
