VOEvent "Breaking News"?

[Roy Williams]

> A prototype LSST CN^2 web portal is now being designed, with the
> goal of deploying it during the next year.  The alerts may be
> fed from the VOEventNet, or Catalina Sky Survey, or some other
> specific sky-monitoring survey.  This is being deployed now
> in order to develop and test the CN^2 concept as the eventual 
> public information news portal for LSST.
>   

Hey Kirk, interesting story!

I wonder if this is the same effort that Bruce Truax and Jonathan Myers 
are doing with Andrew Drake and me, using the Skyalert[1] software to 
distribute Catalina[2] events to iPhones? Or is LSST developing its own 
independent portal?

One of the questions I would have about the "Transient of the week" is 
the nature of the metadata that comes with the "interesting event", 
since it can come from any one of many streams. The VOEvent itself has 
Author info, Spacetime info, Classification info, and Description. Are 
these 4 the basic parts for the "Transient of the week"? How does the 
schema match with astronomerstelegram.org or CBAT? Some other metadata 
we are delivering[3] to LSST are magnitude, freshImageURL, 
referenceImageURL, furtherInfoURL, findingChart, findingChartImage, 
pastImgs, otherImgs, lightCurve.

Roy

[1] http://skyalert.org
[2] http://crts.caltech.edu
[3] http://www.skyalert.org/static/jsonQueryForm.html

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California Institute of Technology
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