SALT&PEPPER - Supernova Alerts for the Liverpool Telescope & PEPPER

An automated pipeline to identify interesting transients from the Transient Name Server (TNS) and request observations of them with the Liverpool Telescope and its MOPTOP instrument for the PEPPER Survey.

SALT&PEPPER is broken into 5 modules

• BILLY: Updates a local copy of the TNS database using the updates released daily by the TNS at 00:00 UTC.
• LUCY: Calculates the priority score lists for both PEPPER Fast and Slow Surveys.
• MR. KITE: Send out 2 daily email alerts - one with the priority score lists, the other with the statuses of observation requests made to the Liverpool Telescope.
• RITA: Requests observations of the transients with the Liverpool Telescope.
• SGT. P: Automatically downloads any data of observations requested via SALT&PEPPER from the Liverpool Telescope archive.

Instructions

• Clone this repository.
• Fill out the credential files ("bot_info.json", "email_creds.json", "LT_creds.json", and "LTarchive_creds.json") with the required information.
• Specify the observational parameters in the "obs_prams.json" file.
• Add any email addresses to “correspondents.csv” (one per line) which will receive the daily alerts.
• Install the packages required to run the pipeline via: pip install -r requirements.txt.
• Download ltrtml from here and put "ltrtml.py" in the base SALT&PEPPER directory.
• Use crontab to run SALT&PEPPER daily. E.g., 00 22 * * * cd {your path to SALT&PEPPER directory}; bash SnP >> SnP.log 2>&1 will run the pipeline every day at 22:00 local time and add any outputs to the log. Note, a built-in delay means the pipeline will not start until after 00:00 UTC when the TNS updates are released.