Built a web-based planetarium that tracks vera rubin alerts plus more

The target location appears to be in the extended range of the galaxy. However, when reviewing the magnitude history (including non-detections), it appears that the observation that generated the alert shows a very similar magnitude as prior observations (within the expected noise range), so it’s probably not of interest. Further data points are needed, though, as there’s always the chance that it was just catching the start of a brightening.

I see the filters down at the bottom of the screen for noise, recentness, magnitude, and altitude above the local horizon at whatever location has been set. Those should be very useful! In testing them, the only downside that I’ve noticed is that it seems to be filtering by altitude based on where the object is right now, instead of where it will be tonight when follow-up observations would happen. That means most objects that would be up tonight are filtered out during the day when observing runs are planned. Is there any way to have it filter by object altitude tonight, since that info is already present in the “Observation Planner” (in the Obsere tab)?

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Hi Kelly, I updated the altitude filter to reflect altitude tonight. Also I was thinking more about the light curve and implemented an algo to determine the statistical spread of non-event detections to determine a noise floor. Not sure how accurate it is given the small sample size but it gives another way of looking at it more objectively. Here’s another one that I just found VR Observatory Explorer