Transient Plotter

In 2008, my advisor, Dr. Dan Reichart, led an expansion and modernization of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's introductory astronomy curriculum. The centerpiece of our new introductory astronomy curriculum is the introductory astronomy laboratory/observing course, which now serves more than a thousand students per year, across roughly a dozen institutions.

As part of this modernization, we built numerous open source, educational graphing tools that students use to visualize and manipulate the data that they collect as part of the laboratory course. I built one of these tools, the Transient Plotting tool. This graphing tool models calibrated optical photometry and infers the two properties that characterize how an astronomical target's brightness varies with time and frequency. That is, the temporal and spectral indices. The photometry modeling algorithm implements the Campaign Manager's afterglow model for magnitudes.

This tool is useful beyond education and is currently being used by the Skynet team to infer the temporal and spectral indices of observed gamma-ray bursts. When the tool is used as the GRB observing campaign is ongoing, the indices can be used to update the Campaign Manager's exposure scaling equation.

Getting There

Go to https://skynet.unc.edu/astr101l/graph/ and click Nah, I need the old tool. This will direct you to the legacy graphing tools (the tools are currently being migrated to a new repo that is better written, organized, and maintained). The Curve tool is loaded by default. Click the dropdown in the upper left to see a full list of the plotting tools. Click on Transient at the bottom.

Upon loading the page, the data table will be populated with dummy data and displayed in the graphing window.

Source Code

The transient plotting tool has both front end and server side components. The web UI is written using pure TypeScript. The server uses Flask as a framework and is in written using Python.

The repos were created and are currently maintained by various undergrad students that come and go with the semesters. My only contributions are to the transient tool code.

Web UI source code: https://github.com/SkynetRTN/skynet-plotting

Server source code: https://github.com/SkynetRTN/skynet-plotting-server