Campaign Manager

What is the Campaign Manager?

Built in 2004, the Skynet robotic telescope network originally consisted of six 0.4-m telescopes located at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes. The network was designed to carry out simultaneous multi-wavelength observations of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) when they are only tens of seconds old. To date, the network has been expanded to ~20 telescopes, including a 20-m radio telescope, that span four continents.

The Campaign Manager (CM) is a new observing mode that I designed, developed, deployed, and maintain for Skynet. The CM is an autonomous observing algorithm designed for rapid and continuous observing of fast-evolving transient events.

Making use of the afterglow exposure scaling model that we developed, the CM will automatically determine the best exposure length needed to observe the target even if its brightness is varying on a rapid time scale. This solves the frustrating problem of under- or over-exposing images which results in lost information at potentially critical times.

Available to all Skynet observers, the CM is useful for follow up to various transient phenomena including gravitational-wave events, GRB localizations, young supernovae, and eventually, sufficiently bright Argus Optical Array and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope events.

The Campaign Manager Systems Paper

The algorithm description described in the paper is severely deprecated since the time of publication in 2022.

I published a systems paper titled Skynet’s New Observing Mode: The Campaign Manager to the astronomy journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The paper describes the reason for building the Campaign Manager, how it was built, and how to use it as an observer.

Because the Campaign Manager is still being actively updated, I recommend using this documentation site as a reference rather than the published paper which cannot be modified to reflect the updates.

A freely available version can be found on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08613.