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G. G. Spear (SSU), J. A. Mattei, A. Price (AAVSO), T. Graves, T. Borders, G. Slater, L. R. Cominsky (SSU)
The GLAST Telescope Network (GTN) is a collaboration among observers and small observatories who will obtain observations of base-line activity levels and follow-up observations for bright blazars. These AGNs have their jets pointed directly toward us, and are one of the key science objectives for NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission. Funded by the GLAST Education and Public Outreach Program, the GTN consists of students, teachers, amateur astronomers, small college observatories, and professional astronomers. The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) is a non-profit international scientific and educational organization of thousands of advanced amateur and professional astronomers interested in stars or star-like objects that change in brightness. With millions of variable star observations dating back more than 90 years, the AAVSO has unique experience with handling, processing, and displaying large amounts of data and with coordinating observers from every corner of the globe.
The GTN-AAVSO blazar program will recommend observing programs, and provide advice and mentoring for observing techniques and data reduction. The program will archive magnitude estimates and measurements of blazars, as well as CCD images of blazar fields.
The GTN-AAVSO program will employ the AAVSO database system and lightcurve generator (http://www.aavso.org/adata/curvegenerator.shtml) to archive magnitude estimates. The magnitudes will either be visual estimates or CCD measurements. Magnitudes are submitted online, and will be immediately available to the public for use in planning observing programs and estimating current activity levels.
The GTN-AAVSO program will also employ the online image archiving system developed by the GTN. Images of blazar fields will be available for subsequent analysis by contributors to the program, and by the GLAST science team for mission planning and follow-up studies.
We will present examples of the AAVSO lightcurve generator, examples of the GTN image archive system, plus examples of the data we are currently accumulating.
http://glast.sonoma.edu/gtn http://www.aavso.org/gtn
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://glast.sonoma.edu/gtn. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: spear@sonoma.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.