MOCPy has STMOC and timeMOC type objects, which can explore the region and times that events might happen. Is this something that Lasair can support, or only flat MOCs?
The science goal is: If I had ~10000 stars that I wanted to monitor at certain windows of time, could I do that with Lasair?
Lasair’s watchmaps are 2D sky area – RA and Dec. The primary reason for watchmaps is to find counterparts of multi-messenger astronomy such as gravitational wave events; in that case the sky area is complex, but the time dimension is simple, just a start and stop, so we only need flat MOCs.
An alternative to us enhancing the real-time system might be an off-line data mining of the Lasair database. We already have a watchlist of 5908 nearby stars. What are you looking for in their lightcurves to do your “Earth Transit Zone” study?
Found it. Technosignatures. If you have the code that can discern that from a light curve, then we can run it on ZTF.
Yep! We have some signal types (e.g. the “SETI Ellipsoid”) that rely on coordinating when+where to look (but are relatively uninformative as to what to search for). Recent overview on this I gave here at UW:
So I envision a time-window specific watchlist to look for any alerts that come from ~100 stars in a given month long window. We can calculate that window of time for thousands of stars. If any of them have alerts of any kind, that’s a signal to rapidly follow-up to possible signals (e.g. w/ radio telescopes and spectra)