ZChecker: Finding Cometary Outbursts with the Zwicky Transient Facility

Creators: Kelley, Michael S. P.; Bodewits, Dennis; Ye, Quanzhi; Laher, Russ R.; Masci, Frank J.; Monkewitz, Serge; Riddle, Reed; Rusholme, Ben; Shupe, David L.; Soumagnac, Maayane T.

Others:: Teuben, Peter J.; Pound, M. W.; Thomas, B. A.; Warner, E. M.

Abstract

ZChecker is new, automated software for finding, measuring, and visualizing known comets in the Zwicky Transient Facility time-domain survey. ZChecker uses on-line ephemeris generation and survey metadata to identify images of targets of interest in the archive. Photometry of each target is measured, and the images processed with temporal filtering to highlight morphological variations in time. Example outputs show outbursts of comets 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 and 64P/Swift-Gehrels, and an asymmetric coma at C/2017 M4 (ATLAS).

Additional Information

© 2019 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. M. Kelley acknowledges support from the NASA/University of Maryland/Minor Planet Center Augmentation through the NASA Planetary Data System Cooperative Agreement NNX16AB16A. Q. Ye acknowledges support from the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation PIRE program under Grant No 1545949. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. Major funding has been provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST- 1440341 and by the ZTF partner institutions: the California Institute of Technology, the Oskar Klein Centre, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan. This research made use of: the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013); and, sbpy a community-driven Python package for small-body planetary astronomy supported by NASA PDART Grant No. 80NSSC18K0987.

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