The Palomar Transient Factory: System Overview, Performance, and First Results

By N. M. Law, S. Kulkarni, R. Dekany, Eran Ofek, R. Quimby, P. Nugent, J. Surace, C. Grillmair, Joshua S. Bloom, M. Kasliwal and 31 more. 2009

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The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a fully-automated, wide-field survey aimed at a systematic exploration of the optical transient sky. The transient survey is performed using a new 8.1 square degree camera installed on the 48 inch Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory; colors and light curves for detected transients are obtained with the automated Palomar 60 inch telescope. PTF uses 80% of the 1.2 m and 50% of the 1.5 m telescope time. With an exposure of 60 s the survey reaches a depth of mg′ ≈ 21.3 and mR ≈ 20.6 (5σ, median seeing). Four major experiments are planned for the five-year project: (1) a 5 day cadence supernova search; (2) a rapid transient search with cadences between 90 s and 1 day; (3) a search for eclipsing binaries and transiting planets in Orion; and (4) a 3π sr deep H-alpha survey. PTF provides automatic, real-time transient classification and follow-up, as well as a database including every source detected in each frame. This paper summarizes the PTF project, including several months of on-sky performance tests of the new survey camera, the observing plans, and the data reduction strategy. We conclude by detailing the first 51 PTF optical transient detections, found in commissioning data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49a591412715ddd5c61793ccf2f9435b41ee2ec6

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Citations in the corpus

THE EARLY UV/OPTICAL EMISSION FROM CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE (2010, background): “Ground based SN surveys with high rate sampling (less or order of a day, e.g. Law et al. 2009; Quimby 2006) will detect SNe at the early stages of their expansion, with a bias towards detection of the more abundant type II SNe.”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: QUASAR TARGET SELECTION (2015, background): “PTF The Palomar Transient Factory5 (PTF ) is a wide-field photometric survey aimed at a systematic exploration of the optical transient sky via repeated imaging over 20,000 deg2 in the Northern Hemisphere (Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009).”
THE CATALINA SURVEYS PERIODIC VARIABLE STAR CATALOG (2014, background): “Eighteen of these SN occurred during the operation of CRTS (Drake et al. 2009) and other large transient surveys, such as PTF (Law et al. 2009) and PanSTARRS-1 (Hodapp et al. 2004).”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “Examples of more modern dedicated surveys are the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS; Drake et al. 2009), the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009), Pan-STARRS1 (Kaiser et al., 2010), and SkyMapper (Murphy et al., 2009).”
SUPERNOVA LIGHT CURVES POWERED BY YOUNG MAGNETARS (2009, background): “Our initial investigations have revealed that if an appreciable fraction of highly magnetic NSs are born rapidly rotating, then we should find evidence for them in the plethora of supernovae surveys, such as the Palomar Transient Factory (Law et al. 2009).”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “…such as asteroseismology (e.g., CoRoT; Baglin et al. 2006, Kepler; Gilliland et al. 2010), time-domain astronomy (e.g., Palomar Transient Factory; Law et al. 2009, Pan-STARRS; Kaiser et al. 2010), galactic archaeology (e.g., APOGEE; Zasowski et al. 2013, GALAH; De Silva et al. 2015), and…”
Unifying Type II Supernova Light Curves with Dense Circumstellar Material (2016, methodology): “Surveys with rapid cadences, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (Law et al. 2009) and the All-sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (Shappee et al. 2014) make this an ideal time to identify SNe early, so that these critical spectra can be taken.”
OPTICAL DISCOVERY OF PROBABLE STELLAR TIDAL DISRUPTION FLARES (2010, methodology): “With the advent of optical transient surveys, such as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009), Pan-STARRS (Chambers 2007), Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) and later the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; Ivezić et al. 2008), there should be many candidate TDEs.”
The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive (2018, methodology): “It builds upon the predecessor surveys: the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009) followed by the intermediate PTF (iPTF) program using the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt Telescope (P48) at Palomar Observatory.”
A real-time fast radio burst: polarization detection and multiwavelength follow-up (2014, methodology): “The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) uses the 1.2-m Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory at R-band with 60 s exposure times to search for optical transients over 8.1 deg2 (Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009).”
A Population of Short-Period Variable Quasars from PTF as Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates (2016, background): “The scientific goals and the technical aspects of the PTF project are detailed in Rau et al. (2009) and Law et al. (2009).”
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III (2015, background): “The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009) is performing a narrow-band survey in two filters, centered at 656 nm and 663 nm, to complete the catalog of galaxies in the local universe out to 200 Mpc.”
PROPER IMAGE SUBTRACTION—OPTIMAL TRANSIENT DETECTION, PHOTOMETRY, AND HYPOTHESIS TESTING (2016, methodology): “Tests on real images We tested the new method on imaging data available from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF17; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009) data release 2.”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “Rapid cadence makes it possible to serendipitously catch very short-lived events, such as eclipses in ultra-compact double degenerate binary systems (Anderson et al. 2005), to constrain the properties of fast faint transients (such as optical flashes associated with gamma-ray bursts; Bloom et al. 20”
Nearby Supernova Rates from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search. II. The Observed Luminosity Functions and Fractions of Supernovae in a Complete Sample (2010, background): “Knowledge of the SN LF will also provide guidance on the expected number and brightness distribution of SNe in several new large surveys (e.g., Pan-STARRS, Kaiser et al. 2002; Palomar Transient Factory, Law et al. 2009), which can be used to estimate and coordinate the necessary resources for the fo”