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C. B. Markwardt (NASA/GSFC & U. Maryland), Swift/BAT Instrument Team
The Swift gamma-ray burst observatory was launched in November, 2004. Swift detects gamma-ray bursts and autonomously performs rapid follow-up observations of the afterglows. The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is a wide-field coded-aperture telescope on board Swift. It is sensitive to gamma-ray bursts on many time scales (> 4 ms) in the 15-150 keV band. While Swift is not responding to gamma-ray bursts, the BAT observes the sky in survey mode. With a large field of view of >2 sr, galactic and extra-galactic X/gamma-ray sources are observed serendipitously. The first three months of pointed observations have been combined to construct a BAT all-sky map in hard X-rays. At least ~90 sources have been detected, including some AGN. For the brighter sources, we will present representative light curves.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #2
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.