canspice.org

When I started out in astronomy I never meant to be an asteroid hunter. Now, five years after getting my BSc that’s what I’m turning into.

Okay, I’m not just hunting asteroids. I’m hunting things that pop, things that swell, and things that dance. Supernovae, variable stars, gamma ray bursts, these things will soon be my prey.

See, the telescope I work for (UKIRT) just took delivery of a wide field camera, the appropriately-named Wide Field Camera (or WFCAM for short). One of the problems with these large cameras is that they produce a tremendous amount of data, too much data to easily ship to astronomers doing research with the camera. In WFCAM’s case the peak data rate is about 460GB per 10-hour night. That’s about 100 DVDs full of data each night. Too much data for Joe Random Astronomer to reduce on their desktop. Thus the data is going to be shipped to a central clearing-house in the UK, reduced there, and the astronomer is going to be delivered a catalogue of detected objects. However, the data takes some time to ship to the UK from Hawaii, and once it’s there it’ll take some time to reduce and get into their database.

Because of this time-delay there’s the potential that time-sensitive detections will be discovered much too late to do anything about them. It’s no good to anybody if WFCAM observes a supernova and it only gets discovered three months later.

Enter the eSTAR/WFCAM Transient Object Detection Agent. That mouthful is what I presented in poster form at ADASS XIV in Pasadena last month. What it does is sit at the end of our data reduction pipeline at the telescope and detect transient objects. There’s a whole mess of things like cross-correlation and databases and THE GRID (oh there it is again). We’ll be implementing the whole thing early next year with the help of Alasdair Allan, who’ll hopefully be coming out to Hawaii for it.

And in the great tradition of presenting early results, I can gladly say that we got it working last week. With humans in place of all of the software, of course.

Last week I was looking at some of the results of a WFCAM run. It consisted of four sequences of the same field in four filters in the near infrared. I was blinking through the four results in an image viewer (and so much more!) called GAIA, and co-worker Vicki was marvelling at all the pixels when I scrolled over to a part of the frame and saw something moving. Vicki said it was a spaceship.

I looked it up the next day and found out it was discovered four years ago and has been named 2000 SB277. Want to see it? Here it is!

So our first detection of a transient object. Luckily we’re going to come up with software to find them because there’s no way I’m looking at every single result out of this instrument.