Abstract
The early and complete temporal characterization of optical, fast, transient sources requires continuous and multiband observations over different timescales (hours to months). For time-domain astronomy, using several telescopes to analyze single objects is the usual method, allowing the acquisition of highly sampled light curves. Taking a series of images each night helps to construct an uninterrupted chain of observations with a high cadence and low duty cycle. Speed is paramount, especially at early times, in order to capture early features in the light curve that help determine the nature of the observed transients and assess their astrophysical properties. However, the problem of rapidly extracting source properties (temporal and color evolution) with a heterogeneous data set remains. Consequently, we present Muphoten, a general and fast-computation photometric pipeline able to address these constraints. It is suitable for extracting transient brightness over multitelescope and multiband networks to create a single homogeneous photometric time series. We show the performance of Muphoten with observations of the optical transient SN 2018cow (from 2018 June to 2018 July), monitored by the GRANDMA network and with the publicly available data of the Liverpool Telescope.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 114504 |
| Journal | Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific |
| Volume | 134 |
| Issue number | 1041 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 1 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:M. W. Coughlin acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with grant Nos. PHY-2010970 and OAC-2117997. IRiS has received funding from the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University—A*MIDEX, a French “Investissement d’Avenir” program (ANR-11-LABX-0060—OCEVU and AMX-19-IET-008—IPhU. This research made use of Photutils, an Astropy package for detection and photometry of astronomical sources. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. S. Antier is grateful for the support of ANR MITI grant “Sciences Participatives” to conduct this research. A.V.F.'s group is grateful for support from the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, the TABASGO Foundation, and the U.C. Berkeley Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science (where A.V.F. was a Miller Senior Fellow). KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the University of California, the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation, and the TABASGO Foundation. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google. TAROT was built with the support of the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers, CNRS, France. TAROT is funded by the CNES, and we acknowledge the help of the technical staff of the Observatoire de Haute Provence, OSU Pytheas.
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