LSST alerts in BHTOM

[Lukasz Wyrzykowski]

Dear BHTOM community,

The Vera Rubin Observatory LSST survey has recently started alerting on transients in great numbers. While most of them are very faint (23-21 mag), there is a subset of potentially interesting targets which are currently bright enough for our network to observe. 

With this email, I would like to let you know that we will be adding selected LSST alerts to the BHTOM target list and encouraging you to undertake the challenge of observing them. 

As of today, there are these two potentially interesting transients:

https://bhtom.space/targets/LSST_170046089928376424

dec = +2, visible well from many locations, very blue transient, at about 21 mag in g and 20.5 in B-band, still rising.

https://bhtom.space/targets/LSST_313994139532263447

dec = -27, currently at about 19.5 mag in i-band and still rising.

At these magnitudes, the targets will be a challenge for telescopes smaller than ~0.5m, but if you know your telescope well and can go for long exposures (or stacks), you should be able to obtain scientifically valid data. As usual, multiple filters and multiple epochs are going to be the most useful datasets to collect.

Clear skies!

Lukasz

on behalf of the BHTOM team