Announcement of the campaign (2008/03/12)
We are planning a multi-wavelength campaign on the blazar Markarian 501 (Mrk 501), starting on March 20th and finishing on May 26th (most coverage will be provided during period March 27th till May 14th, with a break between April 16th and April 24th).
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.
The campaign managers are David Paneque (dpaneque@slac.stanford.edu) and Daniel Kranich (kranich@particle.phys.ethz.ch).
Please contact the campaign managers 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 .
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. We aim to publish (almost) simultaneously the data from the single instruments and the joint publication with the first overall data interpretation from the campaign.
Although there will be no GLAST gamma-ray data (GLAST is currently in Kennedy Space Center, at Cape Canaveral, Florida), the opportunity for good multi-wavelength coverage of this source right now is excellent at other wavelengths. In addition to the intrinsic scientific interest, this campaign can be used to establish planning and coordination routines for the upcoming years of multi-wavelength blazar observations with GLAST.
Observation schedule
The instruments participating in the campaign, together with the (approximate) observation schedule can be found here
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
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
Roadmap for the data reduction and interpretation
A dedicated web page can be foundhere.