Following up on Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) candidates with the Virgin Islands Robotic Telescope (VIRT)
ZTF uses a new robotic camera with a 47 square degree field of view mounted on the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Schmidt telescope. 47 degrees is an unprecedented amount of sky view! Thats the equivalent sky area of 247 full moons! With such a large field of view, ZTF will capture hundreds of thousands of stars and galaxies in a single shot. Every night, ZTF will observe 3750 square degrees per hour.
- Active Galactic Nuclei & Tidal Disruption Events
- Stellar Astrophyiscs
- Cosmology with type Ia Supernovae
- Electromagnetic, Gravitationnal Waves & Neutrinos Counterparts
- Solar System Bodies
- Physics of Supernovae & Relativistic Explosions
- Detailed study of the Andromeda Galaxy
MARS provides access to all public alerts issued by ZTF since the start of the public alert stream on June 1, 2018. Alerts can be accessed by using the website or the API they have set up.
Located in St. Thomas, USVI, the Etelman Observatory hosts the 0.5m Virgin Island Robotic Telescope (VIRT). We are the easternmost location compared to the continental U.S. and therefore we are well sited to follow-up transients not observable by facilities in the Canary Islands or in the mainland U.S. Using VIRT at Etelman we are interested in following up on all of the ZTF science goals, especially Tidal Disruption Events, Stellar Astrophyiscs, Physics of Supernovae & Relativistic Explosions, and Solar System Bodies. VIRT data will be combined with other faiclities that UVI has access to, including the Las Cumbres Observatory network and the Gemini telescopes.
This python based code utilizes the MARS API to download the most recent transient candidates from ZTF.
Our ultimate goal is to select a subsample of ZTF interesting candidates (rb >0.95) is so that we can follow up using VIRT and our other telescopes.
1.The code is not finished yet 2. I'd like others to be able to use the code I have written. The code is useful for others who would like to see how to use the MARS API, and also useful for finding which candidates are available to view and at what time they will be highest in the sky. 3. Feel free to contact me with any suggestions or critics to improve it
Chris Murphy, Physics major at the University of the Virgin Islands