Announcement of the Campaign.
The Fermi/LAT team is organizing a multi-wavelength campaign to observe the binary system PSR B1259-63/SS 2883 before, during, and after its periastron passage, which will take place on 2010 December 14.
The main goal of the campaign is to study the flux and broad-band spectral energy distribution from this source. Observations will be carried in radio, optical, IR, X-rays, and gamma-rays. The multi-wavelength data set from this campaign will allow us to better understand fundamental aspects of neutron stars and their radiation mechanisms as well as the evolution of binary systems hosting pulsars.
For this campaign, the policy on data sharing will be: if you observe and send data that are included in a resulting multiwavelength publication, you will be a co-author unless you just want an acknowledgment. Anyone who contributes data keeps the right to publish those data separately, but we request that any separate publication 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.
Telescopes and instruments participating in the campaign as well as their corresponding schedules can be found here .
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 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