Announcement of the campaign (2010/12/02)
The Fermi/LAT team is organizing a multi-wavelength campaign on the blazar Markarian 421, starting on December 3rd 2010 and finishing on December 1st 2011.
The most important part of the campaign will be from December 2010 to June 2011; which is the time interval with good visibility for optical/TeV instruments. The goal for this time interval is to sample daily (or every 2 days) the peaks of the 2 components in the SED of Mrk421 (optical/X-ray and GeV/TeV)
This is a continuation of the multi-instrument and multi-year project we started back in 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) over a long baseline and over timescales as short as one day (or hours/minutes if the source flares). This multifrequency data set will allow us to understand better the underlying physics in Mrk421, as well as in High frequency Peaked BL Lacs in general.
Please contact David Paneque (dpaneque@slac.stanford.edu) if you have telescope time and are interested in joining this campaign.
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. 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