Southern Telescope AGN Reverberation Experiment
2 May 2012

They're a bit late, but the comparison star finders and B and V magnitudes are now posted on the "Targets" page for NGC 3783 and ESO 383-G035.

*** MCB ***



1 March 2012

Spectroscopic monitoring of NGC 3783 and ESO 383-G035 has begun at CTIO and will continue on through the end of May.

*** MCB ***



31 October 2011

Due to some rather large scheduling problems in the month of October at CTIO, we have not used all our spectroscopic monitoring time, so we will be continuing to monitor three targets through the month of November. NGC 6814 is setting too early in the night to follow it, so we will only concentrate on NGC 7469, NGC 7213, and NGC 1566 through November. With the scheduling problems fixed, we've gotten spectra on 7 of the last 13 nights, so we seem to be back on track with the spectroscopy. Analysis is still ongoing, but is going a bit slow because of the usual classroom distractions for everyone involved.

*** MCB ***



30 September 2011

The weather at CTIO has been much more cooperative during the month of September. Our goal is to acquire spectra approximately every other night. Over the last ~three weeks, we've acquired spectra on 12 out of 22 nights. Fingers crossed that the weather continues to treat us nicely, since we have some rather large gaps in our time coverage during the month of August.

We were awarded 10.6 hours of time to continue monitoring our 4 targets with the LCOGT Faulkes Telescope South in Siding Spring from October 1 to November 10. Yay, us!

I was away at a conference last week and busy writing proposals this week, but I'm hoping to shortly catch up with the spectroscopic reductions and post some preliminary light curves here in the next few weeks

*** MCB ***



28 August 2011

The weather at CTIO hasn't been great. We're scheduled for spectra on average every other night, but we got started a bit late (due to scheduling issues) and we had a decent sized gap due to weather in the middle of August. Let's all hope that the weather has settled down for the most part now as we head into September. I have our spectral reduction pipeline up and running and will be playing catch up on the reductions over the next week or two (the semester just started here and I've been a tad busy).

The photometric monitoring is coming along nicely. We have lots of data being transferred to the FTP server from several observatories. Two GSU undergraduate students, JG and TD, will be organizing all the images and analyzing them in a consistent manner for the 4 targets. As soon as we have some light curves to share, I'll be sure to post them here.

*** MCB ***



18 July 2011

Comparison star sequences for a 10' x 10' field of view are now available for all the fields, courtesy of collaborator Bill Keel.

*** MCB ***



7 July 2011

Our AAVSO alert notice was circulated today in anticipation of the kick-off for our photometric monitoring. We've already been getting some interest from the community! The alert notice can be found here.

*** MCB ***



14 June 2011

We have had our observing time confirmed for the SMARTS 1.5m telescope. We have 96 hours of service time dedicated to spectroscopy, and the current schedule gives us 60 hours of time over August-September, and the remaining 36 hours over October-December (albeit very heavily front-loaded for that time period). I love it when a plan comes together!

*** MCB ***



13 June 2011

The STARE website has gone live! There are still many details to be added before our campaign officially begins, but we now have a presence on the world wide web.

*** MCB ***


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