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[55.01] A Common Pipeline for Real-time Detection of Optical Transients via Frame Subtraction for LONEOS, SDSS, SuperMACHO and ESSENCE

A. Miceli, A. Rest, G. Miknaitis (University of Washington), A. Becker (Lucent/Bell Labs), Ricardo Covarrubias, C. Stubbs (University of Washington), B. Schmidt (Australian National University), J. Tonry (University of Hawaii), R. C. Smith, R. Hiriart (NOAO/CTIO)

We describe a data pipeline which carries out end-to-end analysis of CCD data, beginning with raw frames off the telescope and resulting in identification of interesting optical transients. Frames are debiased, flattened, cross-talk corrected and astrometrically calibrated. Template images of the field are then brought into alignment with the new frames, convolved to match point spread functions and subtracted from the new data. Object detection is performed on the resulting difference frames and a series of tests are carried out to suppress false positives. The pipeline consists of a backbone written in Perl which does book-keeping and process management and a set of programs written in C which do the actual operations on the data. Results are then passed to an SQL database (see Hirart, et al). This work was supported by funding from the McDonnell foundation.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: amiceli@astro.washington.edu

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.