Group A: Supernovae and massive stars

Participants

Science Project

SNe progenitors (Mark to lead)

• What images are there available THAT INCLUDE THIS SKY POSITION ? i.e. not just near, or thereabouts, but actually include the positon
• Return the Galactic foreground extinction for this sight line.
• Can they be prioritised and quantified :

1. Image quality/resolution
2. Depth == exposure time + telescope aperture
3. Wavelength coverage

• Determine the "best" images in as many wavelengths as possible from the UV -> Far IR. Save these to MySpace

I.E. WE WANT ADVANCED SEARCH CRITERIA, AND TO BE ABLE TO SAVE THESE SEARCH CRITERIA TO MYSPAVE FOR REUSE (e.g. wavelength, telescopes etc).

What about ESO, Spitzer etc. that aren't in there yet ? Raw vs. calibrated ? Obviously we would like reducted data

Load the best optical images into Aladin and view. - Are they registered to the same astrometric calibration ? - Check with e.g. USNO or 2MASS - Register the images Mark the position of the SN (or particular object) on the images, and plot interesting catalogued objects e.g. known HII regions, clusters, other SNe in this galaxy.

Link to the GRB/GCN catalogues - temporal and area window searches.

Can photometry be done on these images immediately ? Can it be done within the workbench flow, or do we need external zeropoint ?

How do we pipe the images to GAIA, IRAF (or IDL) ?

SNe and LBV outbursts (Seppo/Andrea to lead)

• see page at SNe and LBV outbursts

FLAMES Survey - massive stars and surveys (lead Carrie)

• Load FLAMES object catalogue myspace -
• Overlay on LMC/SMC images from either our project, or DSS

• Can we lable the O-stars/B-stars/B-supergiants/binaries etc ?

• Cross-correlate X-ray, and IR (2MASS for NIR, Spitzer for MIR) catalogues

• Do any of our targets have interesting counterparts in the other wavebands ?

• Are the binaries corellated with X-ray/IR detections for example ?

• What about the INT H-alpha survey and the Spizter Glimpse survey for e.g. LBV detections ?

The FLAMES fits files of cluster images were easily uploaded and transferred to Aladin. The catalogues, which were in ASCII format needed to be converted to CSV (comma separated files) a tiresome process but once done is easily transferrable to most applications. Obviously this is only relavant to your own catalogues. These were transferred to TopCat and saved as VOTABLES.

In TopCat or Aladin these tables could be used to display ra and dec of the objects. We manipulated the tables in Top Cat to select out all binaries from the catalogues using the string functions. These were saved as a seperate boolean column, which could be saved so as to bring up this subset any time you open the file in the future. This is a very useful tool to manipulate catalogues eg for target selections.

The next step was to cross-correlate our FLAMES objects with catalogues through astrogrid. One thing that would be useful here is to be able to transfer the co-ordinates of the field from Aladin to Astroscope to do a search on those co-ordinates. Astroscope returned an awful lot of information and here I think the future VO explorer will really simplify things.

We had a problem with the Spectroscopic Binary objects catalogue as by transferring it to TopCat, TopCat was automatically disconnected from the plastic.

We managed to copy across many catalogues to TopCat and to carry out a cross-correlation of these catalogues with ours. However the catalogues we tried came up with very few matches. Will need to find more appropriate catalogues to cross-correlate with.

We displayed a spectra in Splat, however we were limited by our knowledge of this tool. It would be helpful to have IDL available where we can pipe the data to this and be able to up load our own IDL programs.

Overall Astrogrid is a great interface for searching the different databases, that it currently has access too. ESO is the notable missing database. I found that the searching tool is a bit limited currently but the VOexplorer looks like it will solve most problems as it will allow a much more selective search. My lack of knowledge of the helper tools limited my usage of astrogrid.

A suggestion would be to include a workshop in the PPARC summer school for first year PHD students, to cover astrogrid, the helper tools, and PYTHON. This is one way to ensure a large usage of astrogrid in the future.