Announcement of the campaign (2009/01/11)
The Fermi/LAT team is organizing a multi-wavelength campaign on the blazar Markarian 421 starting at the end of January and finishing at the beginning of May.
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 Mrk421.
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 closes 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 preliminary and will be updated soon).
Activity of the source during the campaign
Most of the instruments will be providing flux estimates (on a daily basis, whenever possible) of the measurements 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 community about the source activity.
The table with the preliminary flux estimates can be found here (under construction)
Light Curves with the preliminary fluxes
The preliminary information provided by the different instruments was used to produced Light curves reporting on the activity of the source during the campaign.
A web page with all those light curves can be found here (under construction)