Related papers: The Transient Optical Sky Survey Data Pipeline
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
Over the past decade, time-domain astronomy in optical bands has developed rapidly with the operations of some wide-field survey facilities. However, most of these surveys are conducted with only a single band, and simultaneous color…
The "TNOs are Cool!: A survey of the trans-Neptunian region" is a Herschel Open Time Key Program that aims to characterize planetary bodies at the outskirts of the Solar System using PACS and SPIRE data, mostly taken as scan-maps. In this…
The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. Each GOTO robotic mount holds eight 40 cm telescopes, giving an overall…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) operates four fully automatic telescopes to search for occultations of stars by Kuiper Belt Objects. It is a versatile facility that is also useful for the study of initial optical GRB…
One of the new frontiers of astronomical research is the exploration of time variability on the sky at different wavelengths and flux levels. We have carried out a pilot project using DPOSS data to study strong variables and transients, and…
We present SPLOT, a small scale pilot survey to test the potential of snapshot (single epoch) linear imaging polarimetry as a supplementary tool to traditional transient follow-up. Transients exist in a vast volume of observational…
Technology has advanced to the point that it is possible to image the entire sky every night and process the data in real time. The sky is hardly static: many interesting phenomena occur, including variable stationary objects such as stars…
The Simons Observatory (SO) is an upcoming polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) survey experiment with three small-aperture telescopes and one large-aperture telescope that will observe from the Atacama Desert in Chile. In total, SO…
The Northern Sky Variability Survey (NSVS) is a temporal record of the sky over the optical magnitude range from 8 to 15.5. It was conducted in the course of the first generation Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE-I) using a…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) monitors fields of up to ~1000 stars at 5 Hz simultaneously with four small telescopes to detect occultation events from small (~1 km) Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The survey presents a number…
The scientific interest in studying high-energy transient phenomena in the Universe has largely grown for the last decade. Now, multiple ground-based survey projects have emerged to continuously monitor the optical (and multi-messenger)…
We report on the methodology and first results from the Deep Lens Survey transient search. We utilize image subtraction on survey data to yield all sources of optical variability down to 24th magnitude. Images are analyzed immediately after…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an 8-m optical ground-based telescope being constructed on Cerro Pachon in Chile. LSST will survey half the sky every few nights in six optical bands. The data will be transferred to NCSA and…
Since its launch, TESS has provided high cadence observations for objects across the sky. Although high cadence TESS observations provide a unique possibility to study the rapid time evolution of numerous objects, artifacts in the data make…
We present the TRansient Image Processing Pipeline (TRIPP), a transient and variable source detection pipeline that employs both difference imaging and light curve analysis techniques for astronomical data. Additionally, we demonstrate…
Large digital sky surveys, over a broad range of wavelengths, both from the ground and from space observatories, are becoming a major source of astronomical data. Some examples include the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Digital…
SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) will be a spectrograph for the ESO NTT telescope capable to cover the optical and NIR bands, based on the heritage of the X-Shooter at the ESO-VLT. SOXS will be built and run by an international consortium, carrying…
Overshooting tops (OTs) are informative indicators of convective storm intensity and are widely utilized in meteorological analyses. This study presents an automated algorithm for OT detection and OT height estimation using convolutional…
Temporal sampling does more than add another axis to the vector of observables. Instead, under the recognition that how objects change (and move) in time speaks directly to the physics underlying astronomical phenomena, next-generation…