Difference: TaskCandidateFlow ( vs. 1)

Candidate Monitoring

We need to regularly monitor that SN candidates are retrieved as expected. Most days things will work, but we need to notice if they do not, find out what is wrong and notify the correct group if needed. Several things could cause data to stop flowing: bad or poor weather, IPAC down, UW down, DESY down or bandwidth issues.

A second topic of this Task is to determine how to react to transient that need immediate action. This could be candidates close to known strong lenses, or SNe in nearby galaxies. Presumably we would wish to send immediate emails (SMS?) to some list of people. We might also want some standard procedure for action (look at Keck observer, think of Gemini, SNIFS night etc). We might also always want to have some person designated to be on standby for these alerts. The Task Chair is not expected to be on standby all the time, but rather have organized some list of who is.

This is also a good section to include monitoring of very old transients. As candidates are kept in the database as long as they are active, we will eventually get polluted by bad subtractions or AGNs. We therefore regularly need to look at things that have been irregularly active for a long time, and implement some rule for manually ejecting these.

Finally, scanning for image artifacts is an integral part of the candidate inspection. If we end up having to do a lot of scanning this requires a distinct task, while if we end up only looking at a smaller number this could be organized by this chair.

Possible new tools we need:

• Automatically retrieve number of exposures last night or continuously, w QA numbers, create webpage where these are compared with the number of new candidates in AMPEL.
• Monitor TNS/ATel for external detections and make sure interesting candidates are ingested if needed.
• (Weekly?) check whether there are old, inactive candidates still in the AMPEL live DB.
• Scripts and methodology for reacting and dealing to candidates that needs to be responded to immediately (lensed SNe, early SNe, ...)
• Scanning! Exactly who does what, where, needs discussing.

-- JakobNordin - 13 Nov 2017