FAQ

How does Ampel help for systematic selection of transients when I still have to make choice for what candidates to follow-up (e.g. with spectroscopy)? This is achieved through two steps: (i) Ampel allows you to implement a fully automatic way to make candidate selection, not necessarily relying on a human selection process (and the potentially biases caused). To what extent this is realized is decided by each user. (ii) The container implementation will allow you to rerun an observational campaign, after its completion. Questions of sample selection and completeness typically can be phrased as what if questions: How would my selected sample have looked with more follow-up time? Which candidates would have been selected based on another lightcurve fitter? Through rerunning a campaign with modified selection parameters it will be straightforward to determine which candidates would then not have been observed, and which would have.

Is Ampel an alert broker? Not really. The term alert broker is typically used for a system that receives a large stream of alerts, potentially append additionally information provides and after some level of filtering propagate the alerts to a further layer (which could be another broker or a user). Ampel can provide some of this functionality in terms of receiving and filtering transients. However, Ampel is not designed to distribute the full alert to external users and Ampel does not guarantee events to be processed within a given (very small) time. Ampel can be described as an alert manager that receives alerts, possibly from a broker, and then "does" something to them.

How does Ampel compare with ANTARES?

Can I run Ampel?

How can you allow time-consuming software to run on rapid transient flows?

What about vizualisation?

Then there are TOMs and Marshalls?