Meeting Rationale
The October 2022 ZTF team meeting will be focused on recent results from within the collaboration, and provide an avenue for extended discussion about what the collaboration would like to do for the final ~12 months of the survey. Potential changes could be made to the cadence, follow-up (SEDM Palomar), or filter choices adopted by the survey. Participation in the first two days of the meeting will be limited to ZTF collaboration members. The final day of the ZTF meeting will be open via invitation from the organizers and to ZTF collaboration members. This last day will be focused on a discussion of “Time-domain astronomy with small aperture telescopes in the Rubin era.”
We are in the dawn of a new era for time-domain astronomy as the Rubin Observatory will increase the rate of observed transient events by more than an order of magnitude. While many new efforts will be focused on LSST, whatever cadence the survey ultimately adopts will be to the detriment of some TDA science (nothing can ever be truly synoptic). In the runup to LSST the TDA community has developed tons of (highly successful!) infrastructure on smaller aperture telescopes over the past two decades. This raises an interesting question: what is the role of these small aperture telescopes once Rubin starts? Rubin is expensive, so an argument could be made for phasing out such work. Or these systems could be re-deployed to work in concert with Rubin, or redirected to produce orthogonal time-domain observations.
The aim of this meeting is to bring together researchers in time-domain astronomy to discuss potential strategies and synergies for different small aperture facilities once Rubin begins routine operation. The meeting will be primarily focused on discussion, with the aim of developing new plans (complementing and competing with Rubin) using small telescopes.
Location
Hilton Orrington
1710 Orrington Ave, Evanston, IL 60201