Chandra Announcement: Chandra Events at the 20th HEAD Meeting
Tara Gokas
Chandra Events at the 20th HEAD Meeting
The Chandra Director’s Office would like to bring to your attention some Chandra-related events during the 20th meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. The Chandra X-ray Center is proud to be a sponsor of this meeting, and we hope to see many of you there. Please refer to the meeting program for the latest information or to explore other events. All times are HST.
We would like to bring particular attention to two Chandra Source Catalog 2.1 sessions. If you are interested in attending, please fill out this Google form; filling it out does not obligate your attendance, but will nevertheless be helpful for our planning. If you leave your email address, we can send you information relevant to the session in advance of the meeting, including tutorial materials.
Chandra X-Ray Observatory Booth (Grand Promenade)
We encourage you to visit the Chandra booth, where you can browse featured materials, learn about opportunities to work at the Chandra X-ray Center, pick up swag, interact with Chandra staff, and catch up on the goings-on of the Observatory. We will be on the Grand Promenade for the duration of the meeting!
Innovation Prize Talk: Forty Years of ACIS: What’s Left to Learn (Monarchy Ballroom)
Tues, Mar 28: 1:30 PM
https://submissions.mirasmart.com/HEAD20/Itinerary/EventDetail.aspx?evt=62
Mark Bautz & Gordon Garmire
The Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) instrument aboard the Chandra X-ray Observatory was conceived some 40 years ago, completed about 15 years later, and is now in its 24th year of operation on orbit. In this talk we attempt to highlight from the long and rich saga of the instrument some of the key innovations and innovators that brought ACIS into being and/or sustained it over the years. We recount some of the challenges encountered in ACIS development and operations, and consider whether these still offer any guidance for people and organizations aspiring to build instruments for future large X-ray observatories.
Splinter Session: CSC 2.1 Hands-on Tutorial (Kona 4)
Thurs, Mar 30: 12:30 PM
https://submissions.mirasmart.com/HEAD20/Itinerary/EventDetail.aspx?evt=19
The Chandra Source Catalog version 2.1 (CSC 2.1) adds observations released publicly between January 1, 2015 and the end of 2021, uncovers a significant portion of new sky for X-ray exploration, and has a number of algorithmic enhancements with respect to the previous version. In this splinter session we will host a hands-on workshop/tutorial for users to get familiar with the different access interfaces to CSC 2.1, including our Table Access Protocol (TAP) service that can be used with Virtual Observatory tools such as astroquery and pyvo. We also introduce users to a few science threads that exploit the catalog data products, such as light curves and spectra, and provide Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how to access these data products and how to use them for scientific applications such as AGN selection and transient identification. This session is complementary to our accepted Special Session on the science enabled by the CSC.
Special Session: CSC 2.1 New Avenues for Discovery in X-ray Datasets (Monarchy Ballroom)
Thurs, Mar 30: 2:00 PM
https://submissions.mirasmart.com/HEAD20/Itinerary/EventDetail.aspx?evt=5
The new version of the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC 2.1) is a rolling release currently in production, with processed datasets already available to the users. The final release, expected in the first half of 2023, expands on version 2.0 by adding over 4,500 observations released publicly between January 1, 2015 and December 31, 2021, corresponding to an increase of more than 40% of the sky area covered, relative to CSC2.0. The nearly 450,000 individual X-ray sources in CSC 2.1, the vast majority of which are serendipitous, represent a significant opportunity for population studies and data-driven discovery in high energy astrophysics, and a rich data repository with many applications in the era of Big Data and Open Science. In this special session we will present CSC 2.1 and highlight some relevant, cutting-edge science questions that the catalog has been used to address, through presentations on specific science projects. We will introduce attendees to the diverse dataset of tabulated properties and data products that make up the catalog, including spectra and light curves, and discuss features of CSC 2.1 that facilitate multi-wavelength science, such as our effort to align the catalog astrometry to the Gaia reference frame and the cross-matching of the CSC with Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). A diverse cohort of early career scientists will present their CSC-enabled research and discuss how CSC can be used to advance high energy astrophysics.