Chandra Announcement: Chandra Source Catalog 2.1 sessions during the AAS HEAD20 meeting

[Tara Gokas]

Dear Chandra users,

We would like to bring your attention to the following Chandra Source Catalog 2.1 sessions that will take place during the AAS HEAD20 meeting in March. If you are potentially interested in attending, please fill out the following (very short) google form. Filling it out does not bind you to attend, but it allows us for better planning. You can also leave us your email address, so that we can send you information relevant to the session in advance of the HEAD meeting, including tutorial materials.

https://forms.gle/DSN3WAA7BapGQYKz7

The sessions are:

1. Splinter Session: Chandra Source Catalog version 2.1: Hands-on tutorial

Thursday, March 30th, 12:30 P.M.

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 used 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.

2. Special Session: The Chandra Source Catalog version 2.1: New Avenues for Discovery in X-ray Datasets

Thursday, March 30th, 2:00 P.M.

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.

Many thanks,

The Chandra Source Catalog team