Hi,
Thank you for the information about 3I/ATLAS. I have a follow-up question regarding comets in Rubin alerts.
I pulled Fink data for Feb 26 to Mar 10 and can clearly see asteroids both in unknown detections and in ssObject matches. However, I couldn’t identify any comets, neither by characteristics (motion, magnitude) nor by designation search. Are comets present in the alert stream, or do they require a specific filter or a different data product?
Thank you for your question and patience! I am the Community Forum watcher this week, and I am following up with our team.
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Great question @LienaDreams! I (and others, e.g., @isullivan) investigated some facets of this recently. The “good” news is that many comet alerts didn’t happen because of software bugs (since fixed, but the software won’t be rerun on the old data) and bad luck (e.g., poor template coverage). Presently, comets are not being associated by Rubin (and, even if we were attempting to associate them, this would often be problematic because of how far off comets can be from their expected position); so if an object that appears as an alert is known to be a comet, it will not be identified as such in the alert packet. An example of alerts showing comet 472P:
https://lsst.fink-portal.org/?action=conesearch&ra=148.9757811&dec=0.858554021&r=5.0
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@ColinOrionChandler Hi Colin,
Thank you so much, especially for the link to 472P, that’s very helpful. I’ll download the Feb 20 dataset and try to find it, just to better understand how comets appear in Rubin alert data.
Once the bugs are fixed and alerts resume, I’ll try searching for comets again, and I’ll come back with questions if anything comes up.
I’m also getting interest from people outside of astronomy (just enthusiasts) who are curious about how to search for comets and interstellar objects in Rubin data. So we’ll definitely stay in touch. Your support and experience mean a lot to us, thank you again.
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I should mention that the Rubin Comet Catchers is a Citizen Scence project hosted on the Zooniverse platform that is designed to enable the public to do exactly that (search for active objects). As soon as Rubin lets us post new images up there, there’ll be announcements and I’ll try to link back here as well.
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Colin,
Is there a threshold for retirement set for the subjects in this project? There are already more than 70 classifications per subject—are more classifications really necessary? It just looks like they’ve been left to languish. Please set a threshold and release the current classification participants to other projects (such as your ActiveAsteroid).