MW campaign on 1es1959+650:
Roadmap for the data analysis, interpretation and publication
:
:
:
Extended to August 2009
:
Now that the observations have been already performed, we need to work towards the analysis and the interpretation of those observations. One or more publications will come out from these efforts. The steps we want to undertake are 1) data reduction and data submission, 2) Interpretation of the reduced data and 3) Publication. In the paragraphs below we expand somewhat those steps:
1 - Data reduction and data submission
The campaign spanned from September 20th till November 5th. However, due to the low brightness of this source at GeV energies, as well as several improvements in the Fermi data analysis we had during hte last months, we decided to delay the date for the reduction of the data. This will allow us to use Fermi data from August 2008 up to August 2009, which will provide us with a more significant detection. This is the first time that this source is detected at GeV energies and we want to characterize the high energy component as good as possible. Another advantage of using data up to August 2009 is the fact that there were TeV observations during May/June/July with MAGIC, which will greatly improve the characterization of the high energy bump.
Any data at other frequencies (radio to TeV) belonging to this period of time (Aug2008-Aug2009) is very much appreciated.
We'll have a virtual (EVO) meeting where the different groups can report on their respective data analysis. This will allow the participants of the campaign to have a good overall picture of all the individual instrument results. The pdf/ppt files from this meeting will be archived and made available to the others for future references. Such meeting will occur on August 12th.
The different groups will analyze the data from the observations, and will produce files with the format described in the Data format web page. Note that standarizing the format for all the reduced data from the different instruments has several advantages:
1) We facilitate the combined analysis of data sets coming from different instruments.
2) We make sure that the files contain all the relevant information necessary for the proper understanding of the data reduction and results.
3) We make sure that different versions of the data reduction (due to improvements or bug corrections) are properly tagged, which will avoid confusion at the time of interpreting the results.
The only disadvantage is the time that the individual analyzers need to spend to make a script/program that converts their reduced data into the specified data format. Note however that this is a one-time job; once done (at the beginning), then it is just a matter of running such script/program every time a new analysis is done. I have some experience doing scripts to automatize procedures; I can offer help to those who might need it.
The collaborations or proposal PIs are the responsibles for the data reduction and the reliability (best efforts) of the results. Yet constructive feedback from the other groups is always encouraged; past experience shows that critic evaluation of the results by other groups can point to bugs that later on can be corrected, hence improving the reliability of the results.
EVO meeting (Aug 12, 2009): agenda.2 - Interpretation of the reduced data
All groups who participated in the campaign and agree (sign) the Data Policy agreement will have access to all the observational (reduced) data from this campaign, and thus will be able to participate (if they wished) in the physical interpretation of the overall data set. The data will be accessible through the Data Access web page.
We'll organize several (weekly or biweekly) virtual (EVO) meetings to discuss the results from the different people/groups contributing to the interpretation of the data. We hope we can reach convergence within 1 or 1.5 months (that is roughly July 2009). The agreed results will be the prime material for the combined data (MW) publication. The reports (pdf/ppt) from these meetings will be archived and made available to all the participants.
3 - Publication of the results
One or more MW publications could be produced (depending on the results found). The first MW publication will provide a rather straighforward (little bias or high concensus among MW campaign participants) interpretation of the broad-band observational results. Additional MW publications could be done from a different (perhaps more biased) perspective, or could address additional topics using (or not) a more extended set of the observational results.
The author list in these publications will be a list of the people who bring data which are used in the MWL publication, as well as people contributing to the physical interpretation of the results. Participants bringing data that are not used in the publication, will not be part of the author list.
Campaign announcement and development