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The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive
Cenko, S. Bradley; Riddle, Reed; Van Sistine, Angela +46 more
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new robotic time-domain survey currently in progress using the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt Telescope. ZTF uses a 47 square degree field with a 600 megapixel camera to scan the entire northern visible sky at rates of ∼3760 square degrees/hour to median depths of g ∼ 20.8 and r ∼ 20.6 mag (AB, 5σ in 30 sec). We d…
Models and Simulations for the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC)
Galbany, L.; Brown, P. J.; González-Gaitán, S. +28 more
We describe the simulated data sample for the Photometric Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Astronomical Time Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC), a publicly available challenge to classify transient and variable events that will be observed by the LSST, a new facility expected to start in the early 2020s. The challenge was hosted by K…
Machine Learning for the Zwicky Transient Facility
Duev, Dmitry A.; Riddle, Reed; Saunders, Nicholas +47 more
The Zwicky Transient Facility is a large optical survey in multiple filters producing hundreds of thousands of transient alerts per night. We describe here various machine learning (ML) implementations and plans to make the maximal use of the large data set by taking advantage of the temporal nature of the data, and further combining it with other…
Minerva-Australis. I. Design, Commissioning, and First Photometric Results
Riddle, Reed; Kane, Stephen R.; Huber, Daniel +36 more
The MINERVA-Australis telescope array is a facility dedicated to the follow-up, confirmation, characterization, and mass measurement of planets orbiting bright stars discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)—a category in which it is almost unique in the Southern Hemisphere. It is located at the University of Southern Queensla…
unWISE Coadds: The Five-year Data Set
Lang, D.; Schlafly, E. F.; Meisner, A. M. +1 more
We present full-sky coadded maps created by uniformly combining the first five years of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and NEOWISE imaging at 3.4 µm (W1) and 4.6 µm (W2). By incorporating both pre-hibernation WISE exposures from 2010 to 2011 and the first four years (2013-2017) of post-hibernation exposures from the NEOWISE…
Binospec Software System
Chilingarian, Igor; Paegert, Martin; Fabricant, Daniel +6 more
Binospec is a high-throughput, 370 to 1000 nm, imaging spectrograph that addresses two adjacent 8‧ by 15‧ fields of view. Binospec was commissioned in late 2017 at the f/5 focus of the 6.5 m MMT and is now available to all MMT observers. Here we describe the Binospec software used for observation planning, instrument control, and data reduction. T…
BVRCIC Observations, Analysis, and Spectra of The Most Extreme Mass Ratio (Totally Eclipsing) W UMa Binary, V1187 Herculis
Hill, Robert; Samec, Ronald G.; Chamberlain, Heather +4 more
CCD, BVRI primary light curves of V1187 Her were taken in 2017 May and 2018 May at the Dark Sky Observatory in North Carolina with the 0.81-m reflector of Appalachian State University. A spectrum was taken earlier at Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) with the 1.8 m telescope. The spectral type is F(8.5 ± 1)V, resulting in a surface temperat…
A Code for Robust Astrometric Solution of Astronomical Images
Ofek, E. O.
I present a software tool for solving the astrometry of astronomical images. The code puts emphasis on robustness against failures for correctly matching the sources in the image to a reference catalog, and on the stability of the solutions over the field of view (e.g., using orthogonal polynomials for the fitted transformation). The code was test…
An Investigation of the Pleiades Cluster Using Machine Learning
Gao, Xin-hua
This paper presents an investigation on fundamental astrophysical properties of the Pleiades cluster (M 45) using high-precision astrometric and photometric data from the Gaia Data Release 2 (Gaia-DR2). To obtain reliable cluster members, a machine-learning (ML) method is used to compute membership probabilities for 31462 sample stars within a rad…
First Radial Velocity Results From the MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA)
Swift, Jonathan J.; Berlind, Perry; Calkins, Michael L. +52 more
The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a dedicated observatory of four 0.7 m robotic telescopes fiber-fed to a KiwiSpec spectrograph. The MINERVA mission is to discover super-Earths in the habitable zones of nearby stars. This can be accomplished with MINERVA’s unique combination of high precision and high cadence over long tim…