Announcement of the campaign (2009/12/08)
The Fermi/LAT team is organizing a multi-wavelength campaign on the blazar Markarian 421, starting on December 8th 2009 and finishing on December 1st 2010.
The most important part of the campaign will be from Mid-December 2009 to Mid-June 2010; which is the time interval with good visibility for optical/TeV instruments. The goal for this time interval is to sample DAILY the peaks of the 2 bumps in the SED of Mrk421 (optical/X-ray and GeV/TeV)
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 multi-frequency 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 (the schedule is often updated with new future observations as well as with the obs 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 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** (not yet available)
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