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This page contains REAL-TIME information on detections of
transient astronomical happenings from the
Deep Lens Survey, on the KPNO and
CTIO 4-m telescopes using the wide-field MOSAIC imagers.
A by-product of this wide-field survey is the detection of
transient astronomical phenomena, including Near Earth
Objects (NEO), Kupier Belt Objects (KBO), Supernova (SN),
and even previously unknown events which happen with such
rarity that only a deep, wide field survey, such as this
one, is even reasonably sensitive to them.
The table below contains recently updated information on
objects detected during the course of this survey.
These are extracted from the images in real-time using a
combination of
SExtractor
for object detection and image subtraction to provide
differenced images, from which we are able to identify
transient, or "new", objects, after filtering out spurious
objects like cosmic rays. These objects have also been
inspected by eye and categorized as probably real.
We include the date, DATE-ARCH, when the object was added
to this archive or updated, the date the object was most
recently observed DATE-OBS (MJD), and the FILTER of this
observation. Additionally, we include the RA and DEC
(J2000, to ~0.5'' accuracy) of the object, a preliminary
categorization of the nature of the transient, and a
preliminary estimate of the magnitude of the
variability (+/- 0.1 mag in R and B, +/- 0.5 in V and z, in
photometric conditions). We do not take into account
extinction due to non-photometric conditions. Two types of
images are available for download: .jpg mosaics and .fits finding charts.
The mosaic page includes a time-series of JPEGs showing
200-pixel (50")
postage stamps, with time increasing from top to bottom.
The discovery mosic includes a template observation on the
left, discovery image in the middle, and difference image
on the right. Subsequent mosaics show a similar collection
of images, or the new observation image only, in the case
where a subtraction image was not available.
The files are generally a few hundred kilobytes.
In CTIO mosaics, East is up and North is to the right.
For KPNO, East is down and North is to the left.
The finding charts are 3'x3' FITS images centered on the
discovery position. The time in the header is the start of
the exposure and the world coordinate system in the header
is accurate to 0.5".
The files are 3 MB. The images are zero-padded to maintain
the object in the center even if it was near the edge of
the discovery image. Your browser may not bring up
saoimage/ximtool automatically on the FITS file.
Right-click on the link to save to local disk.
Moving objects are submitted to the
Minor Planet Center
at the end of each night. For those
objects which receive a designation, we provide a link to
query the MPC database - new objects are indicated with
bold font.
For those objects which do not receive a designation, we
provide our own ASCII list of positions and times.
To make things considerably more exciting, we
will color code interesting transients using the
following notation
| Supernova |
|
Unknown (stationary)
|
| Variable Star
|
| Rapidly Moving Transient
|
| Slowly Moving Transient
(< 2" / hr)
|
|