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Related papers: The Palomar Transient Factory: High Quality Realti…

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We describe the near real-time transient-source discovery engine for the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), currently in operations at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Caltech. We coin this system the…

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is conducting a nightly public survey of all 13 TESS northern sectors in 2019-2020. ZTF will observe the portions of the current TESS sectors visible from Palomar Observatory each night. Each ZTF pointing…

When planning a survey for astronomical transients, many factors such as cadence, filter choice, sky coverage, and depth of observations need to be balanced in order to optimize the scientific gain of the survey. Here we present a software…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-10-09 Ulrich Feindt , Jakob Nordin , Mickael Rigault , Valéry Brinnel , Suhail Dhawan , Ariel Goobar , Marek Kowalski

A fast-turnaround pipeline for realtime data reduction plays an essential role in discovering and permitting follow-up observations to young supernovae and fast-evolving transients in modern time-domain surveys. In this paper, we present…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2016-10-05 Yi Cao , Peter E Nugent , Mansi M Kasliwal

The rate of image acquisition in modern synoptic imaging surveys has already begun to outpace the feasibility of keeping astronomers in the real-time discovery and classification loop. Here we present the inner workings of a framework,…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-28 J. S. Bloom , J. W. Richards , P. E. Nugent , R. M. Quimby , M. M. Kasliwal , D. L. Starr , D. Poznanski , E. O. Ofek , S. B. Cenko , N. R. Butler , S. R. Kulkarni , A. Gal-Yam , N. Law

This paper is an extended summary of the talk I gave at IAU Symposium "New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy" (Oxford, 2011). I first review the history of transients (which is intimately related to the advent of wide-field telescopic…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2012-02-14 S. R. Kulkarni

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has been observing the entire northern sky since the start of 2018 down to a magnitude of 20.5 ($5 \sigma$ for 30s exposure) in $g$, $r$, and $i$ filters. Over the course of two years, ZTF has obtained…

Current time domain facilities are finding several hundreds of transient astronomical events a year. The discovery rate is expected to increase in the future as soon as new surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the Large…

Detecting transient light curves (e.g., transiting planets) requires high precision data, and thus it is important to effectively filter systematic trends affecting ground based wide field surveys. We apply an implementation of the Trend…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2016-06-29 Giri Gopalan , Peter Plavchan , Julian van Eyken , David Ciardi , Kaspar von Braun , Stephen R. Kane

The current data acquisition rate of astronomical transient surveys and the promise for significantly higher rates during in the next decade necessitate the development of novel approaches to analyze astronomical data sets and promptly…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-28 Robert Strausbaugh , Antonino Cucchiara , Michael Dow , Sara Webb , Jielai Zhang , Simon Goode , Jeff Cooke

The Wide-field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER) is a near-infrared time-domain survey instrument operating on a dedicated 1-meter robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory. The project takes advantage of recent technology advances in…

The last couple of decades have seen an emergence of transient detection facilities in various avenues of time domain astronomy which has provided us with a rich dataset of transients. The rates of these transients have implications in star…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-09-04 Deep Chatterjee , Peter E. Nugent , Patrick R. Brady , Chris Cannella , David L. Kaplan , Mansi M. Kasliwal

Modern astronomical surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are capable of detecting thousands of transient events per year, necessitating the use of automated and scalable data analysis techniques. Recent advances in machine…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-04-17 Betty X. Hu , Avi Loeb

We present results of the Sky2Night project: a systematic, unbiased search for fast optical transients with the Palomar Transient Factory. We have observed 407 deg$^2$ in $R$-band for 8 nights at a cadence of 2 hours. During the entire…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2019-02-12 J. van Roestel , P. J. Groot , T. Kupfer , K. Verbeek , S. van Velzen , M. Bours , P. Nugent , T. Prince , D. Levitan , S. Nissanke , S. R. Kulkarni , R. R. Laher

We present DeepStreaks, a convolutional-neural-network, deep-learning system designed to efficiently identify streaking fast-moving near-Earth objects that are detected in the data of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a wide-field,…

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey generates real-time alerts for optical transients, variables, and moving objects discovered in its wide-field survey. We describe the ZTF alert stream distribution and processing (filtering)…

While optical and radio transient surveys have enjoyed a renaissance over the past decade, the dynamic infrared sky remains virtually unexplored. The infrared is a powerful tool for probing transient events in dusty regions that have high…

(Abridged) Palomar Gattini-IR is a new wide-field, near-infrared robotic time domain survey operating at Palomar Observatory. Using a 30 cm telescope mounted with a H2RG detector, Gattini-IR achieves a field of view of 25 sq. deg. with a…

The Asteroid Terrestrial impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system consists of two 0.5m Schmidt telescopes with cameras covering 29 square degrees at plate scale of 1.86 arcsec per pixel. Working in tandem, the telescopes routinely survey the…

Exploration of the time variability on the sky over a broad range of flux levels and wavelengths is rapidly becoming a new frontier of astronomical research. We describe here briefly the Palomar-QUEST survey being carried out from the…