RESOURCES

Telescopes/Facilities

Our team is typically awarded more than 400 nights of telescope time each year (more than 1 night per night!). We use a combination of private and public facilities and ground and space facilities. We are grateful for the opportunity to use these valuable resources.

Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, hosts the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes

UC Observatories acts a managing partner of the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii. From the summit of Hawaii’s dormant Maunakea volcano, UC astronomers probe the local and distant Universe with unprecedented power and precision.


Pan-STARRS searches for Near Earth Objects

Pan-STARRS consists of two telescopes located near the summit of Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. Each telescope has a diameter of 1.8 meters, and is equipped with a very large format camera. The Pan-STARRS1 camera has 1.38 Gigapixels, and the Pan-STARRS2 camera has 1.47 Gigapixels. The field of view of each camera is approximately 3 degrees in diameter, and 7 square degrees in area. Pan-STARRS1 has been operating since 2010. Pan-STARRS2 is newer, and became fully operational in 2019.

In 1971, the Carnegie Institution put into operation the first telescope at its new observatory on Cerro Las Campanas in Chile. The Swope Telescope, a 1-meter (40-inch) reflector, is named after a former Carnegie astronomer, Henrietta Swope, a collaborator of Walter Baade and the author of several classic papers, whose generous gift made possible the construction of the telescope.


Purpose-built to observe transient astronomical events, astronomical phenomena whose duration can range from seconds to several years.

A global distribution of telescopes. The spread of telescopes around the world greatly increases the opportunities to observe all astronomical events; and transient events can be targeted immediately. The light from celestial objects can be sampled with greater frequency and for longer durations when observations are passed from one telescope to the next.


Code

kaepora is an open-source relational database of Type Ia Supernova observations. We also provide tools for creating composite spectra using the methods from Siebert et al. 2019.

YSE-PZ is a transient management system and web application. It is the primary interface for the Young Supernova Experiment.

teglon is a relational database that tessalates the sky and combines with various astronomical catalogs such as galaxy catalogs and reddening maps. We use teglon to combine two-dimensional gravitational wave data with these catalogs to prioritize observations and analyze each event.

A modern refactoring of the old websniff interface for examining candidate transients in difference images. In addition to a modern SQL backend, it includes nice improvements such as vote tracking.

Our python-based data reduction pipeline is built to produce the best spectral reductions for transient science. We have made every effort to produce the best flux-calibrated spectra with superb local background subtraction. It has been extensively tested with Lick/Kast and Keck/LRIS spectra, but it is also possible to reduce other data sets (e.g., SOAR/Goodman), and adding new low-resolution spectrographs requires only minor modifications.

An all-in-one script for downloading, registering, and drizzling HST images, running dolphot, and scraping data from dolphot catalogs. This script is optimized to obtain photometry of point sources across multiple HST images.

Data