Open Exploration of the Time Domain with the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey

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The Catalina Sky Survey is a NASA-funded program to search for moving objects in our solar system. The NSF-supported Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) makes complimentary use of this same data stream to search among the fixed background stars for transient events, like supernovae and other forms of stellar explosions, and to monitor many types of variable sources. It releases its results in real time so that they can be followed up immediately by professional and serious amateur astronomers. The CRTS is developing a new kind of scientific infrastructure: real-time mining of massive data streams coupled with dynamic follow-up strategies. Students have opportunities to participate in hardware or software development, data mining itself, to obtain follow-up observations, and in the scientific analysis of the transient sources. To date, CRTS has discovered over 6500 distinct transient events and over 13 million variable sources. Through both formal and informal collaborations, as well as data sharing with the entire astronomical community, CRTS is enabling studies of variable stars, active galactic nuclei, the explosions that mark the endpoints in the life cycles of stars, stellar flares, cataclysmic variables and recurrent novae, planets around white dwarfs, new counterparts of gamma-ray sources, and many other interesting phenomena observable through "time domain astronomy". This award provides funding for continuation of this highly-successful program as well as for several key enhancements. This program, using existing telescopes and a large data stream, provides a testbed to develop data mining tools and procedures as a precursor to LSST and other missions under development.