Is it possible to set up an alert for major planet observations? For example, can I set up and alert for whenever Mercury is in the field of view? I’ve tried SNAPS and Fink, but I don’t have an object ID. The Minor Planet Center doesn’t seem to have IDs for planets that I’ve been able to find.
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Are you looking for a notification that an alert was generated from catalogs, when observing a major planet, or you looking to know when Rubin obtains an image that would be expected to contain a major planet?
Even Pluto will, most of the time, be saturated – I believe the alert stream does not send out alerts on detections which include saturated pixels (per Melissa’s answer here - Identifying Suddenly Saturated Objects in the Prompt Pipeline). As such, I don’t think you’re going to find these objects in the alert streams available from SNAPS and Fink.
If it was more of the latter, we don’t currently have a service that would give notifications when we observe a particular location on the sky (or … a moving location, coinciding with the location of a planet), although I have heard some indications that dashboards along these lines may be in the works from community members. Was this the kind of notification you had in mind?
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Thanks for your reply. I’m interested in when an image is expected to contain a planet. I’m OK with it being saturated, I’m interested in the area around it. There are STEREO observations with Mercury passing through the field where it looks like you can see the Na tail, but the STEREO filter efficiency wasn’t well measured at Na wavelengths. It would be looking at distances of ~10^6 km from Mercury.
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That makes sense. Perhaps someone from the CST will chime in with more details about community tools, but I think that you have a couple of potential options but perhaps nothing that is turnkey.
I think the first problem is that you will have to wait until images or at least much larger cutouts are available, which probably wouldn’t be until the prompt products are publicly available.
And the second part, which would be getting an alert when Rubin acquires an image near one of the major planets you’re interested in might be possible with a dashboard, perhaps something SNAPs might support in the future, but it might also be something that isn’t supported out of the box but could be by downloading the previous night’s pointings and comparing them to the expected position of the major planets in the previous night.
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Hi @mattburger, thanks for these questions. As a Forum moderator and Community Science rep, I can chime in here on how to go about this, once the data is available.
Lynne is right that there will not be LSST alerts transmitted to brokers for when a planet was within an LSST visit image. Alerts only go out when a source is detected in a difference image. Planets would be saturated, not detected, and thus no alert.
But there are other ways to find LSST visit images obtained near planets. Lynne is also right that this work won’t be possible until promptly-processed visit images become available, and the timeline for that is currently Oct-Dec (as part of the Early Science Program). At that time, you would use the planet’s ephemerides to calculate where it was the night before, and then run a query on the LSST observations database to find overlapping visit images for your analysis. Perhaps you already knew that and were looking for a way to do this science with alerts, though.
I’m going to mark Lynne’s post as the solution to this topic, but if these responses has left your question unanswered just unmark it and we’ll keep the conversation going. And feel free to open new topics for new questions anytime.
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Thanks for this. I suspected there would be a way to get the coordinates of fields observed. I’ll keep an eye out for when images are available.
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