Microlensing anomaly VOEvent alert messages

[Alasdair Allan]

As for the 2006 season the eSTAR project is now forwarding OGLE  
microlensing event messages onto the VOEvent backbone, and for those  
of you who are monitoring the feed you may have noticed that messages  
started to flow through the network a few days ago following the  
start of observing for the 2007 Bulge season.

However, with apologies for the brief appearance of a number of  
VOEvent observation messages with malformed IVORNs, I'd like to  
announce the arrival of VOEvent messages issued by Robonet-1.0 for  
possible and confirmed microlensing anomalies.

The first of these was recently sent out in response to the anomaly  
in OGLE-2007-BLG-006 can be found archived at,

http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/Robonet-1.0/uk.org.estar/manual/ 
robonet-1.0/OB07006/2007-03-08T14:27:51.xml

For now these messages will be generated semi-automatically in  
response to a request for follow-up time by an observer using the  
PLANET/Robonet-1.0 (+ eSTAR) target of opportunity web service.  
However over the coming bulge season this will be moved to a fully  
autonomous mode with the eSTAR intelligent agent automatically  
generating both event messages, and requests for follow-up  
observations to HTN networked telescopes, as it analyses the data  
from the Robonet-1.0 telescopes in real time.

With these messages starting to appear I thought it might be time to  
remind people how to subscribe. You can subscribe to messages either  
via TCP or RSS. However all the incoming messages are archived and  
made available via the eSTAR website, or for Apple Mac OSX users, via  
a Dashboard Widget.

1) Vanilla TCP

The eSTAR project publishes event messages in real time through a TCP  
server which you can connect up to very simply. A sample client is  
available on the eSTAR web site at

    http://www.estar.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ESTAR_Event_Broker

and the TCP server is available on,

vo.astro.ex.ac.uk

on port,

8099

to which you can connect. I'd appreciate an email if you intend to  
connect to the server on a long term basis.

This is a "hose pipe" feed as you are connecting directly onto a  
backbone node. You should receive all messages currently moving over  
the event network, including; OGLE EWS Microlensing events,  
Robonet-1.0 Microlensing anomalies, SDSS Supernova candidates,  
ESSENCE Supernova candidates, messages generated by the RAPTOR/TALONS  
project and two (different) translations of the GCN Gamma-ray Burst  
message traffic.

2) RSS

If near real time is "good enough", then you also have the option to  
subscribe to event messages via RSS. You can subscribe to these as  
normal using your news aggregator. However if you do not already use  
a news aggregator, there are many freely available clients that you  
can use to read the RSS feeds, and numerous different convenience  
libraries around to let your grab the feeds programatically in your  
language of choice.

There are several RSS feeds available from the eSTAR broker, these  
are currently broken down by the original publisher;

eSTAR native
Including native messages, OGLE microlensing event messages
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/eSTAR/eSTAR.rdf

Robonet-1.0
Including microlensing anomaly event messages
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/Robonet-1.0/Robonet-1.0.rdf

RAPTOR/TALONS
Including native messages, and a translation of the GCN
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/RAPTOR/RAPTOR.rdf

Caltech
Including SDSS messages, and a translation of the GCN
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/Caltech/Caltech.rdf

NOAO
Including ESSENCE messages
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/NOAO/NOAO.rdf

3) Website

All messages are archived as they flow through the eSTAR event broker  
in Exeter, as part of our work on event visualisation we have  
provided timeline interfaces for the OGLE and SDSS message traffic.  
These are available at

OGLE
http://vo.astro.ex.ac.uk/ogle/cgi-bin/timeline.cgi

SDSS
http://vo.astro.ex.ac.uk/sdss/cgi-bin/timeline.cgi

At the top of each page is an event timeline, which has two  
independently scrollable bars (the upper in days, the lower in  
months), which can be panned by clicking and dragging to show  
previous events. The currently visible view in the upper scrollable  
area is represented by a light grey box on the lower area. Each event  
is represented by a marker, labelled with the event name, and  
clicking on the marker will bring up additional data and links for  
that event. The event data is also displayed normally in table form  
below the timeline interface.

4) Dashboard Widget

Recently the eSTAR project has been experimenting (playing?) with  
AJAX interfaces, and as a result has produced a number of OSX  
Dashboard Widgets. These can be downloaded from,

http://www.estar.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Downloads

Amongst these is a widget-ised version of the OGLE Timeline page, see

http://www.estar.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Downloads#OGLE_Timeline_Widget

which you can download and install if you are running Mac OSX Tiger.

Cheers,
Al.