Kochanek 2017 PASP 129 104502
Kochanek 2017 PASP 129 104502
1088/1538-3873/aa80d9
© 2017. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
Abstract
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) is working toward imaging the entire visible sky
every night to a depth of V ~ 17 mag. The present data covers the sky and spans ∼2–5years with ∼100–400
epochs of observation. The data should contain some ∼1 million variable sources, and the ultimate goal is to have a
database of these observations publicly accessible. We describe here a first step, a simple but unprecedented web
interface https://asas-sn.osu.edu/ that provides an up to date aperture photometry light curve for any user-selected
sky coordinate. The V band photometry is obtained using a two-pixel (16 0) radius aperture and is calibrated
against the APASS catalog. Because the light curves are produced in real time, this web tool is relatively slow and
can only be used for small samples of objects. However, it also imposes no selection bias on the part of the ASAS-
SN team, allowing the user to obtain a light curve for any point on the celestial sphere. We present the tool,
describe its capabilities, limitations, and known issues, and provide a few illustrative examples.
Key words: binaries: eclipsing – quasars: general – stars: variables: general – supernovae: general – surveys
Online material: color figures
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
A station consists of four 14cm aperture Nikon telephoto used to limit any optical counterparts to high energy γ-ray
lenses, each with a thermo-electrically cooled, back-illuminated, (Abeysekara et al. 2015) and ICECUBE neutrino events
20482, Finger Lakes Instruments, ProLine CCD camera. The (Aartsen et al. 2017). Internally, ASAS-SN has identified large
field of view of each camera is roughly 4.5deg2, the pixel scale is numbers of previously unreported variable stars which will
8 0, and the image FWHM is ∼2 pixels. With overlaps between start being released in the near future.
observing fields, the instantaneous field of view with five stations As part of the next phase of ASAS-SN, the intent is to provide
will be roughly 360 square degrees. Observations are made using a steadily expanding set of tools for obtaining ASAS-SN light
the V (original two stations) or g (three new stations) band filters curves. The first version, released here, is a tool to obtain an
and three dithered 90 s exposures. Assuming an average 10 hr ASAS-SN light curve of any user-selected position of the sky. It
night, the system will be able to survey 48,000 square degrees is a relatively slow tool since it simply carries out aperture
per night by the end of 2017, with considerable robustness photometry at the requested location, but it also involves no
against weather losses thanks to the multiplicity of sites. The preconceptions on the part of ASAS-SN as to what represents an
operations of ASAS-SN are presently funded through the end interesting source. Bulk light curve requests will not be possible
of 2021. with the current tool because the necessary computations are
To date, ASAS-SN has focused on its primary original goal done on request; we invite anyone interested in large numbers of
of carrying out a survey for bright transients across the visible light curves to contact the ASAS-SN team. The next phase will
sky with minimal observational bias. This was particularly be to build a database of the light curves of known variables and
aimed at obtaining a complete inventory of nearby supernovae variables discovered by ASAS-SN, with the goal of having this
(SNe) to well characterize the local SN rate and its correlations tool available in 2018. The final phase will be to have a complete
with galaxy type and properties. The supernova search, database of light curves for ASAS-SN sources. The staged
cataloged in Holoien et al. (2017c, 2017a, 2017b), has led to releases will allow the ASAS-SN team to develop, test, and
a significant increase in the discovery rate of bright SNe while debug the releases in a logical and controlled order from the
eliminating the bias of amateurs toward SNe in large galaxies. simple to the complex.
ASAS-SN is also finding many more SNe close to the cores of In Section 2, we describe the initial tool and present some
galaxies than other amateur and professional searches. examples of both its uses and its limitations. In Section 3, we
In the process of finding SNe, including the most luminous provide a short summary. Research making use of these light
SN to date (ASASSN-15lh, Dong et al. 2016; Godoy-Rivera curve tools either through direct use of the light curves or
et al. 2017), many other transient sources have also been simply as a source for confirmations should cite Shappee et al.
routinely discovered. The most common are cataclysmic (2014) for the ASAS-SN survey and this paper for the light
variables (CVs), which are so numerous that they are simply curves.
released on a separate WWW page11 and the light curves are
available from the ASAS-SN CV Patrol12 (Davis et al. 2015).
ASAS-SN is the dominant source for reporting new CVs and 2. ASAS-SN Light Curves
CV outbursts (see, e.g., Kato et al. 2016). Rarer Galactic events
The requirement that we impose no restriction on the
are classical novae (e.g., Stanek et al. 2016), M and even L
dwarf flares (e.g., Schmidt et al. 2014, 2016), and outbursts of location at which a light curve can be obtained means that the
young stellar objects (Holoien et al. 2014b; Herczeg et al. light curves must be computed at the time of the request. This is
2016). Rarer extragalactic events are tidal disruption events a straightforward process, but slow compared to pre-computing
(TDEs), where the majority of the best studied TDEs have been light curves for a defined sample of sources and storing them in
discovered by ASAS-SN (Holoien et al. 2014a, 2016a, 2016b; a database. As discussed in the introduction, such tools will be
Brown et al. 2016, 2017a) or are present in ASAS-SN (Brown made available for ASAS-SN in the relatively near future.
et al. 2017b), and “changing-look” AGN (Shappee et al. 2014). Figures 1 and 2 summarize the number of epochs and the
ASAS-SN has not focused on other sources of variability to temporal span of the ASAS-SN data at the present time. On
date, although the project has supplied light curves or average, there are 2.6 images per epoch, which is less than the
variability searches for a range of other projects. For example, nominal value of 3 because we initially used only two dithered
there are studies of “eclipsing” events (Rodriguez et al. images per epoch and weather and scheduling idiosyncrasies
2016, 2017; Osborn et al. 2017) and other (Gully-Santiago can lead to obtaining fewer than 3 good images. Most of the
et al. 2017) properties of T Tauri stars. Littlefield et al. (2016) structures in the two figures can be understood from the history
examined the recovery of the intermediate polar FQAquarii by which ASAS-SN reached its current state with two stations
from its low state in 2016. ASAS-SN observations were also each with four cameras. ASAS-SN started with the Hawaii
station and two cameras (ba and bb) in early 2013, and it was
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http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/transients.html expanded to four cameras (adding bc and bd) in (roughly)
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http://cv.asassn.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/ 2013 December. The CTIO station was deployed with two
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
Figure 1. Equatorial projection of the number of available ASAS-SN epochs. There are some artifacts because of historical details as ASAS-SN built up to two
complete stations. There are, on average, 2.6 images for each epoch.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
cameras (be and bf) in 2014 May and expanded to four The present tool, https://asas-sn.osu.edu/, takes as input a
cameras (adding bg and bh) in 2015 July. coordinate (R.A./decl.) and a look-back time (days) and then
Initially, we tried to observe the entire sky visible from provides a light curve for that position both as a graph and as a
Hawaii, but then dropped the Galactic plane and declinations downloadable table by doing aperture photometry on the
<-20 to increase the cadence for the extragalactic fields. As individual ASAS-SN images. The look-back time is provided to
the system approached its current state, we resumed observing allow the rapid extraction of the recent behavior of a target. Images
the Northern Galactic plane. Hence the time spanned by the taken in particularly poor conditions, that were out of focus
data is relatively uniform above declination -20, but there (FWHM > 2.5 pixels), had poor astrometry, or where the source
are fewer epochs along the plane. From CTIO, we initially is within 0°. 2 of the detector edge are automatically rejected. The
avoided the Southern Galactic plane, but then began latter restriction opens no gaps in the sky coverage because of the
observing it somewhat after we resumed observing the 0°. 5 field overlaps. Photometry is simply extracted at the requested
Northern Galactic plane. The Magellanic Clouds, M31 and position, as there is no need for any re-centering step for the
M33 are observed at a higher cadence. Most of the other images with good astrometry. This also means that it is possible to
smaller-scale structures are minor artifacts from dealing with obtain light curves for faint sources close to bright sources, making
some shifts in field definitions as cameras were added. Under allowance for the effects of crowding (see below).
the present plan, the McDonald Observatory station will have For the selected images, the photometry is done using the
cameras bi-bl, the SAAO station will have cameras bm-bp, IRAF apphot package and calibrated using the AAVSO
and the second CTIO station will have cameras bq-bt. Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS, Henden et al. 2012). The
Images from the new stations will be incorporated into this signal is taken from a 2 pixel radius aperture (i.e., about 2
tool after an initial period for testing. FHWM in diameter) and the background is estimated in a
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
Figure 2. Equatorial projection of the time spanned by the ASAS-SN data. There are some artifacts because of historical details as ASAS-SN built up to two complete
stations, and the temporal coverage of the (Northern) Galactic plane has a significant gap.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
7–10 pixel radius annulus. The background pixels are clipped When the flux is below the 5s detection limit the magnitude is
at 2s . The aperture photometry is done both for the target reported as this upper limit. Since fluxes are well-behaved as
position and 100 nearby 11.5 < V < 14 mag APASS stars they approach zero and become negative, the actual flux
with photometric uncertainties less than 0.075mag. The measurements and their uncertainties are always reported even
APASS magnitude range is chosen to avoid saturation and when below the 5s detection limit. This allows the user to
minimize crowding. The APASS stars are also required to have chose a magnitude limit other than 5s and allows averaging of
no other APASS star within 56. 25 (about 3 ASAS-SN the fluxes across multiple images to reach fainter flux limits. As
FWHM) in separation and 5mag in flux. noted above, most epochs consist of three sequential 90 s
The calibration is set by the median difference between the exposures which can be combined to increase the signal-to-
APASS and instrumental aperture magnitudes for each image noise ratio of the light curves by a factor of 3 (0.6 mag).
after iteratively clipping the APASS calibration stars at a We illustrate the utility of ASAS-SN light curves with four
threshold where we would expect to lose one or fewer stars examples of non-transient sources. In each case, these are the
given Gaussian errors. We assume that any dispersion larger light curves for the individual exposures, and the multiple
than 0.15mag is dominated by outliers and use this as a exposures for each epoch can be combined to reduce the
maximum for the estimated dispersion. After clipping the uncertainties or improve the upper limits. We simply show
calibration sample, the weighted mean is used as the final the data as returned by the query. Figure 3 shows the ASAS-SN
calibration. The returned light curve gives the HJD and UT light curve of a classic example of a high amplitude variable
dates of the observation, the camera name (b?), the FWHM star, R Coronae Borealis (R CrB). The light curve spans
(for monitoring any residual focus issues), the estimated 5s 7.3mag and is well defined even at its brightest points, where it
detection limit for the location, the aperture magnitude and its is well above ASAS-SN’s nominal saturation magnitude (see
uncertainty and the flux estimate and its uncertainty (in mJy). below). Figure 4 shows a much more subtle example, the
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
Figure 3. ASAS-SN light curve of R Coronae Borealis. The different colors are data from different cameras.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
Figure 4. Phased ASAS-SN light curve of the eclipsing binary pair of M dwarfs KELTJ041621−620046 (Lubin et al. 2017). The different colors are data from
different cameras.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
Figure 5. ASAS-SN light curve of the proposed Thorne–Zytkow object HV2112 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (Levesque et al. 2014). Squares with error bars are
detections and triangles are 5s upper limits. The different colors are data from different cameras.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
phased light curve of the eclipsing binary M dwarfs large magnitude uncertainties. As a more distant example,
KELTJ041621−620046 (Lubin et al. 2017). This 1.11 day Figure 5 shows the ASAS-SN light curve of HV2112, a star in
binary has a mean magnitude of V 13.9 and 0.3mag eclipses the Small Magellanic Cloud that Levesque et al. (2014) propose
that are easily seen in the ASAS-SN data. The outliers in is a Thorne–Zytkow object (a red supergiant with a neutron star
Figure 4 can be eliminated by rejecting data with unusually at its core). Finally, as an extragalactic example, Figure 6 shows
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
Figure 6. ASAS-SN light curve of the AGN NGC5548. One anomalous point falls below the bottom of the figure. The different colors are data from different
cameras.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
Figure 7. ASAS-SN (left) and DSS (right) images of the field of WR20a, where the circle around the source is 10. 0 in radius. Contamination due to the local
crowding will generally distort an ASAS-SN light curve by an additive constant in flux.
(A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)
the ASAS-SN light curve of the classic reverberation mapping 0.4 mag) because of the crowding. Since the ASAS-SN image
target (most recently by De Rosa et al. 2015), NGC5548. The FWHM are set by the camera optics rather than atmospheric
variability of this AGN is well determined despite doing the seeing, there are essentially no effects equivalent to the light
photometry at the center of a resolved galaxy. curve distortions produced by combining crowding with variable
The two main issues the user should be aware of are crowding seeing. Despite the distortion of the light curve, there is no
and saturation. The ASAS-SN light curves are fairly robust against difficulty recognizing that the source is an eclipsing binary and
both problems, provided they are neither pushed to extremes nor determining the period. In fact, Figure 8 used the primary eclipse
over-interpreted. To help visually evaluate both issues, the light time of 2453124.569 from Bonanos et al. (2004) but a revised
curve server page returns an Aladin Sky Atlas (Bonnarel et al. 2000; period of 3.684599days because the original 3.686±0.01day
Boch & Fernique 2014) image of the region surrounding the target. estimate clearly led to small phasing errors.
This also provides a visual confirmation of the selected target. ASAS-SN saturates at 10–11mag, where the exact limit
An example of crowding is the massive, eclipsing Wolf- depends on the camera and the image position (vignetting).
Rayet binary WR20a (Bonanos et al. 2004). Figure 7 shows the However, ASAS-SN uses a procedure inherited from the
ASAS-SN and DSS images of WR20a, where the circle around original ASAS survey (Pojmanski 2002) that moves flux out of
the source is 10 0 in radius. At the resolution of ASAS-SN, the the bleed trails of bright stars and back into the central image.
local crowding will tend to change the light curve by some After basic processing, frames are scanned for saturated pixels.
constant in flux, distorting its shape. Figure 8 shows the phased Once one is found, all connected saturated pixels and their
ASAS-SN light curve of WR20a, and we find that the eclipse associated edge effects are identified. The flux of the saturated
depths are slightly underestimated (about 0.3 mag instead of pixels is then added back as a Gaussian around the centroid
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
Figure 8. Phased ASAS-SN light curve of WR20a using the primary eclipse time of 2453124.569 from Bonanos et al. (2004) and a revised period of 3.684599days.
Blending has reduced the amplitude of the eclipses by about 0.1mag. One bad point lies off the bottom of the figure.
Figure 9. Phased ASAS-SN light curve of the bright, saturated P=18.9 day Cepheid VYCar. There are 20 points that lie below 9mag. While there are clear
outliers, the light curve is surprisingly good given that the star is ∼10 times brighter than the saturation limit. With some straightforward editing of the un-phased data,
a much cleaner light curve can be constructed.
position. The regions from which the flux was removed are computed upon request, it does provide the first astronomical
filled in by linear interpolation of the adjacent, unsaturated resource able to provide an up to date light curve for any point
pixels. on the celestial sphere upon demand. If the requested position
To the extent that the charge bleeding process is conservative is currently visible, the most recent epochs will generally be
and the saturated star is relatively isolated, this leads to a less than a week old even with weather interruptions. This
substantial improvement in the photometry of saturated stars. service is not meant for obtaining large numbers of light
We illustrate this in Figure 9 with the light curve of the curves, with requests being self-limiting by the allocated
P=18.9 day Cepheid VYCar. There are clearly outliers and it computational resources. Requests for recent behavior will be
would be unwise to use the photometry for determining the much faster than requests for full light curves. For one random
distance scale, but there is no difficulty recognizing the classic, example, it took 10, 33, 90, and 130 s to obtain a light curve for
long-period Cepheid light curve and determining its period and the last 20, 100, and 1000 days and the full data set,
phase. There are also some clear patterns in the un-phased light respectively. Astronomers interested in obtaining large num-
curves that would allow the production of a clean light curve bers of light curves should contact the ASAS-SN team.
after some manual editing. This bright star correction procedure As outlined in the introduction, the next planned step is to
will not, however, salvage the light curves of the stars that lay provide light curves for known variables and variables newly
underneath the bleed trails. discovered by ASAS-SN. This will be significantly faster, since
the light curves will be pre-computed and stored in a database,
but restricted to a particular catalog of objects. This is a well-
3. Discussion defined process and should be completed in 2018. The full
While https://asas-sn.osu.edu/ as V1.0 of ASAS-SN light scope of the third phase, supplying light curves of sources in
curve servers is slow because the light curves must be general, has yet to be fully determined.
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 129:104502 (8pp), 2017 October Kochanek et al.
We thank the Las Cumbres Observatory and its staff for its Boch, T., & Fernique, P. 2014, adass XXIII, 485, 277
continuing support of the ASAS-SN project. We thank M. Hardesty Bonanos, A. Z., Stanek, K. Z., Udalski, A., et al. 2004, ApJL, 611, L33
Bonnarel, F., Fernique, P., Bienaymé, O., et al. 2000, ApJS, 143, 33
of the OSU ASC technology group. Brown, J. S., Holoien, T. W.-S., Auchettl, K., et al. 2017a, MNRAS, 466, 4904
ASAS-SN is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Brown, J. S., Kochanek, C. S., Holoien, T. W.-S., et al. 2017b, arXiv:1704.
Foundation through grant GBMF5490 to the Ohio State University 02321
Brown, J. S., Shappee, B. J., Holoien, T. W.-S., et al. 2016, MNRAS,
and NSF grant AST-1515927. Development of ASAS-SN has 462, 3993
been supported by NSF grant AST-0908816, the Mt. Cuba Brown, T. M., Baliber, N., Bianco, F. B., et al. 2013, PASP, 125, 1031
Astronomical Foundation, the Center for Cosmology and Astro- Davis, A. B., Shappee, B. J., Archer Shappee, B. & ASAS-SN 2015, American
Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts, 225, 344.02
Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Chinese Academy De Rosa, G., Peterson, B. M., Ely, J., et al. 2015, ApJ, 806, 128
of Sciences South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA), Dong, S., Shappee, B. J., Prieto, J. L., et al. 2016, Sci, 351, 257
the Villum Foundation, and George Skestos. Drake, A. J., Djorgovski, S. G., Mahabal, A., et al. 2009, ApJ, 696, 870
Godoy-Rivera, D., Stanek, K. Z., Kochanek, C. S., et al. 2017, MNRAS,
K.Z.S., C.S.K., and T.A.T. are supported by NSF grants 466, 1428
AST-1515927 and AST-1515876. BJS is supported by NASA Gully-Santiago, M. A., Herczeg, G. J., Czekala, I., et al. 2017, ApJ, 836, 200
through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51348.001 awarded Henden, A. A., Levine, S. E., Terrell, D., Smith, T. C., & Welch, D. 2012,
JAVSO, 40, 430
by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by Herczeg, G. J., Dong, S., Shappee, B. J., et al. 2016, ApJ, 831, 133
the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Holoien, T. W.-S., Brown, J. S., Stanek, K. Z., et al. 2017a, MNRAS,
Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. T.W.-S.H. 467, 1098
Holoien, T. W.-S., Brown, J. S., Stanek, K. Z., et al. 2017b, arXiv:1704.02320
is supported by the DOE Computational Science Graduate Holoien, T. W.-S., Kochanek, C. S., Prieto, J. L., et al. 2016a, MNRAS,
Fellowship, grant number DE-FG02-97ER25308. 455, 2918
Support for J.L.P. is in part provided by FONDECYT Holoien, T. W.-S., Kochanek, C. S., Prieto, J. L., et al. 2016b, MNRAS,
463, 3813
through the grant 1151445 and by the Ministry of Economy, Holoien, T. W.-S., Prieto, J. L., Bersier, D., et al. 2014a, MNRAS, 445, 3263
Development, and Tourism’s Millennium Science Initiative Holoien, T. W.-S., Prieto, J. L., Stanek, K. Z., et al. 2014b, ApJL, 785, L35
through grant IC120009, awarded to The Millennium Institute Holoien, T. W.-S., Stanek, K. Z., Kochanek, C. S., et al. 2017c, MNRAS,
464, 2672
of Astrophysics, S.D. is supported by Project 11573003 Kato, T., Hambsch, F.-J., Monard, B., et al. 2016, PASJ, 68, 65
supported by NSFC. Lang, D., Hogg, D. W., Mierle, K., Blanton, M., & Roweis, S. 2010, AJ,
This research was made possible through the use of the 139, 1782
Law, N. M., Kulkarni, S. R., Dekany, R. G., et al. 2009, PASP, 121, 1395
AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS), funded by the Levesque, E. M., Massey, P., Żytkow, A. N., & Morrell, N. 2014, MNRAS,
Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund. This research has made 443, L94
use of data provided by Astrometry.net (Lang et al. 2010). This Littlefield, C., Garnavich, P., Kennedy, M. R., et al. 2016, ApJ, 833, 93
Lubin, J. B., Rodriguez, J. E., Zhou, G., et al. 2017, arXiv:1706.02401
research has made use of the “Aladin sky atlas” developed at Osborn, H. P., Rodriguez, J. E., Kenworthy, M. A., et al. 2017, arXiv:1705.
CDS, Strasbourg Observatory, France (Bonnarel et al. 2000; 10346
Boch & Fernique 2014). Paczyński, B. 2000, PASP, 112, 1281
Pojmanski, G. 2002, AcA, 52, 397
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