Eyeballer Cheat Sheet#
Overview#
See also
The rota is at the bottom of this page.
Note
You should already be familiar with eyeballing either because you read Michael’s Eyeballing handbook or because you were trained by one of the experienced eyeballers.
First Eyeballer#
- Follow the links sent by st3ph3n - here is the list of priorities:
Fast Track list: Eyeball Now
Extragalactic candidates: Eyeball ASAP (within 1h)
Galactic candidates: Eyeball within 24 to 48h
Eyeball the purgatory list sent by el01z on Fridays
Obviously these times apply for when you’re awake - don’t be setting alarms during the night.
If you’re not sure: snooze the alert by putting in Possible list. It’ll come back to eyeball when the telescopes have looked at that part of the sky again.
Second Eyeballer#
- The duties of the second eyeballers are now limited to:
Check the good list for anything interesting to put in follow-up (particularly check the last week of objects). Alert the relevant people if rapid follow-up needed, or keep the source in your own list for later discussion.
Reminders#
- A couple of reminders ( if these don’t make sense please ask so I can make these docs more useful to you):
CVs do not go in TNS if you’re not sure if something is galactic snooze to wait for more data or ask on slack.
Nuclear transients only go in TNS if you think they are TDEs. AGNs do not go to TNS
The Attic/Galactic list is only for real galactic events. Bad subtractions due to high proper motion stars go in the HPM list.
st3ph3n-bot#
As an eyeballer, the main bot you will encounter is your virtual
counterpart: st3ph3n. Make sure you are in the #vra channel
and receiving alerts. Its role is to rank the alerts from 0 to 10,
with higher ranks being more likely to be extra-galactic transients.
It also automatically garbages alerts with low scores (for more detail see
Garbage Policies) so you can focus on the most
promising alerts.
The slackbot triggers at the end of each ATLAS ingest and sends a
message the #vra channel on the QUB slack. In each st3ph3n
alert you will see the links to the available eyeballing tasks
Tips for eyeballer 1#
Start with the Fast Track list. Also note that you need to eyeball all ranks (even the lower ones) in the Fast Track list.
Go back to slack and click on the eyeball link provided by
st3ph3n. This will take you to the curated eyeball list (ordered and cropped down to the eyeballing threshold).Scroll down to the first alerts that or not rank 10 and eyeball these. They are the most promising which haven’t yet been pinched by another team.
Finally clean up the rank 10 alerts.
5. The ATLAS ingest cycle is faster than it used to be so you may get alerts every 30 minutes when there is not a lot of data being ingested.
If you do not snooze the data you will keep getting poked by st3ph3n even if nothing has changed.
Rota#
Date |
Eyeballer 1 |
Eyeballer 2 |
|---|---|---|
24/03/2025 |
Thomas |
Fiore |
31/03/2025 |
Julian |
Thomas |
07/04/2025 |
Dylan |
Julian |
14/04/2025 |
Ken |
Dylan |
21/04/2025 |
Aysha |
Ken |
28/04/2025 |
Paige |
Aysha |
05/05/2025 |
Josh |
Paige |
12/05/2025 |
Michael |
Josh |
19/05/2025 |
Lauren |
Michael |
26/05/2025 |
Dave |
Lauren |
02/06/2025 |
Charlotte |
Dave |
09/06/2025 |
Xinyue |
Charlotte |
16/06/2025 |
Heloise |
Xinyue |
23/06/2025 |
Alex C |
Heloise |
30/06/2025 |
Jack |
Alex C |
07/07/2025 |
Shubham |
Jack |
14/07/2025 |
Fiore |
Shubham |