The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) is an all sky survey which is funded to discover and track near earth objects. As part of its normal operations, ATLAS also discovers many other forms of transient astrophysical events such as supernovae, variable stars, tidal disruption events. These are handled by the Transient sky survey team at Queen’s University Belfast and Oxford University.
ATLAS is composed of four telescopes, two in Hawaii and one in South Africa and another in Chile.
Who/what is this code for?#
This package allows users of the ATLAS Transient web server to query the server without being exposed to code breaking changes to the underlying API. In particular we have in mind bots and other automated services which need to run smoothly and continuously to ingest and handle a data stream.
It also allows users the make routine queries in a friendlier way, such as: * doing a Cone Search * check out the data in your custom list
Note
If all you want is forced photometry given an RA and Dec check out the Forced Photometry Server
How to get access?#
The ATLAS Transient web server is our production server for the survey, and to manage the load on our machines we cannot give unlimited access.
Anyone with legitimate scientific interests can apply for access by submitting a 1-page max science case to the [Data Request Form](https://forms.gle/Jvy18eejkvxmcN2f6), justifying your access needs (length of time and whether you need Write access - you probably do not).
The ATLAS team will review requests at least once a month on the first Friday. If you require urgent access email hfstevance@gmail.com after submitting the form with the subject line: “Urgent ATLAS access request - [Proposal Title]”. The [Proposal Title] should be the same as the one submitted in the form.
Once you have been granted access you will receive an email with your username and a one-time use password which you will have to change on your first login.
Help I forgot my password!#
The server doesn’t store your email address so it can’t send you an email to reset the password. If you forget it for good, you will need to email hfstevance@gmail.com or ken.smith@physics.ox.ac.uk. We will then use our admin super powers to reset your password to a one-time use password which you will then be able to reset.
Just Admin Things#
Privacy Policy#
As ATLAS users your first name and last name will be stored on our server. Your email address will be stored on a Google Drive spreadsheet alongside the information provided with your Data Access Request Form. We store this data because it is required to provide you access to this service and we will only store it as long as needed to provide this service. The ATLAS user list will be reviewed twice a year: In November and in May. If your Data Access Request is out of date, or if you have not logged into the server since the last review, we will email you with a two-week deletion warning. If we receive no response, your profile will be deleted and your access revoked. If you would like us to delete your data sooner, send an email to hfstevance@gmail.com and we will remove your account and associated data.
Who can see my data?: All users of the server can see your name.surname when you comment on an object. Your email is stored in a private Google Drive spreadsheet that only a couple of project administrators can access.
We will never share your data with third parties
How to contribute to this code?#
If you would like to contribute to this project you are welcome to fork and open a pull request however we strongly recommend asking the dev team (via hfstevance@gmail.com) before you start putting in some work. It’s possible that changes you want to make would require other changes in our telescope pipelines and if we do not have the resources to refactor those codes, or if your changes are incompatible with our other pipelines, we may have to deny what could look like a very sensible PR.
If there are good first issues we will flag them clearly.
Citing this code#
Software in science needs recognition so we can keep funding and human resources allocated. Please cite this DOI in your TNS reports and papers if you used our code, and thank you!
