Announcement of the campaign (2009/02/24)

The Fermi/LAT team is organizing a multi-wavelength campaign  on the blazar Markarian 501  (Mrk501) starting on mid March 2009 and finishing at the end of July 2009.

The main goal of the campaign is to study the flux and spectral evolution of the broad-band emission, from radio to multi-TeV, of Mrk501.

Please contact David Paneque (dpaneque@slac.stanford.edu) if you have telescope time and are interested in joining this campaign. In order to speed up the organization of the campaign, it is recommended to fill in and send us this form (pdf, doc).

For this campaign, the policy on data sharing will be: if you observe and send data that can be used, you are a co-author of a resulting multiwavelength publication unless you just want an acknowledgment. By contributing with data, you also gain the right of participating in the interpretation of the overall (reduced) data collected during the campaign. Anyone who contributes data keeps the right to publish those data separately. Yet those separate publications should be done in a coordinated way, so that we try to have the (potential) single instrument publications close in time to the multiwavelength publication.

Observation schedule

The instruments participating in the campaign, together with the (approximate) observation schedule can be found here (the schedule is often updated with new future observations as well as with the observing times from past observations).

Activity of the source during the campaign

Many of the instruments will be providing flux estimates (best efforts) from  the observations performed during the campaign.
Those flux estimates will be preliminary and are NOT meant to be used in publications. More reliable and more optimized analysis will be performed once the campaign is finished. The purpose  of those preliminary fluxes is JUST to inform the participants of the campaign about the source activity. This information is very useful to decide whether we need to increase the sampling of the source.

A web page with Light Curves with those preliminary flux estimates can be found here.

This web page  is password protected. In order to get the login/pass you need to a) be a participant in the MW campaign; b) agree with the data policy specified here.

Roadmap for the data analysis, interpretation and publication

The work towards the analysis and the interpretation of those observations has already started. Several publications will come out from these efforts. The steps we want to undertake are 1) data reduction and data submission, 2) Interpretation of the reduced data and 3) Publication. The roadmap is described here.This web page  is password protected. In order to get the login/pass you need to a) be a participant in the MW campaign; b) agree with the data policy specified here.