Welcome to the Skyalert Blog, this is the first entry.

The project has been going for a year, taking astronomical transients and sending them out. There has been a big change in the last few weeks, as we have shifted to Atom feeds for event dissemination. You can see the feeds here, these cover some of the more interesting streams: the bright ones from the CRTS survey, the Supernovae and AGN outbursts if that is your interest, SWIFT and Fermi alerts, and others. In the old scheme, it was the Skyalert server sending out email notification and connecting directly to the Twitter server, and thinking how to make mobile-phone uploads. But now the feeds provide the information, but other (non-Skyalert) services can do the mashup, email notification, Twitter, etc — tools like Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner.

For example here is a feed combining other feeds, they are bright CRTS events, SWIFT GRB detections, and bright asteroids from the CSS_NEO survey.

So we will start backing out the special Skyalert code for email and twitter, and use cloud based tools instead for those. Next on the agenda — how can we get a robotic telescope, or even an Arduino to respond to a new event on a feed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.