MicroFUN

MICROLENSING FOLLOW- UP NETWORK

Quick-Look Photometry Disclaimer

Please read this completely before using any of the data in the online MicroFUN photometry archive for any reason.

By using or downloading these files in any way you are implicitly accepting the conditions of use described below.

The microlensing event photometry files on this website represent uncalibrated, preliminary, and incomplete on-the-fly reductions of our data. The primary purpose of these files is to provide the microlensing community with quick access to our ongoing photometry to help decide on observing strategies for on-going lensing events.

As such, the microlensing event photometry data provided on this server are subject to the following caveats:

1. They are not photometrically calibrated, but instead presented as relative photometry in raw instrumental units. No attempt has (yet) been made to scale our instrumental magnitudes to match the MOA or OGLE lightcurves (as appropriate).

2. They are preliminary reductions subject to considerable day-to-day change as we refine the choice of the primary "template" image used by the quick-look reduction pipeline, and refine the choice of non-varying reference stars for relative photometry.

3. They are incomplete in the sense that we do not include any data that did not make it through the quick-look reduction pipeline for whatever reason on a first pass.

Conditions of Use

By accessing these quick-look data, you are implicitly agreeing to the following conditions of use:

1. You may not publish these data in any form, except with explicit written permission from the MicroFUN team leader, Andrew Gould, or his designate.

2. You may not cite these data files in any publication by linking to this website.

3. While you may download copies of these files for your own use (subject to the previously stated conditions), you may not provide electronic copies of these data to anyone in any form.

Failure to follow these conditions may result in your computer being blocked from accessing this website. Persistent abuse of data on this site may result in us having to completely close off open access to this site and begin restricting the use of non-human agents to download data. We really don't want to do this. If you do not agree with any of the above use conditions, please leave this site.

If you have any interest in these data, please contact us directly so we can update you regarding the status of the full data reduction. Most of our data will be re-reduced after the end of the Bulge observing season so that we can choose the best calibration and template files for the reduction.

You are specifically warned against using these data for any scientific purposes without first consulting with us.

Other Data Linked from this Site

Please note that any OGLE or MOA data appearing on this site are simply hyperlinks to the respective project websites, and not separate copies of their data. These links are provided as a convenience for MicroFUN project users (one-stop shopping). For official use of MOA or OGLE data, please refer to their project webpages.

Note about Filters

Photometry filenames include a single-letter code indicating the approximate bandpass used for the observations. Unfortunately there are only 26 letters in the Roman Alphabet, and some ambiguity with traditional photometric filter designations is inevitable. We are unapologetic about this - the filter code is just that; a single-letter code (or shorthand) meant for our internal use.

For data obtained from professional observatories (e.g., CTIO, LOAO, Wise, and Palomar), we typically use standard Bessel V and Cousins I filters. These are designated V and I, respectively, even though the correct notation for the latter should be I_C. So far, none of our observatories have resorted to SDSS filters, so we have no immediate plans to introduce case-sensitive filter designations.

Amateur astronomers using smaller aperture telescopes are generally starved for light, and will observe either unfiltered or using a long-pass filter like a Wratten #12 or Schott OG530 filter. The latter are used to suppress scattered night sky background, which is typically blue in color, but passes most of the Bulge star light, which is typically very red in color. The net effect is to improve contrast against the night sky background over just using the CCD camera unfiltered.

These long-pass filters look yellow or orange-yellow to the human eye in transmission, and when combined with the typical response of a Kodak full-frame CCD detector commonly used in commercial cameras, the resulting effective bandpass varies between a "wide R" and an "R_C+I_C". Because considerable variation from sensor to sensor is found, we designate such frames as R in the photometry file names.

For unfiltered data, the bandpass is mostly the bare CCD QE curve, which can vary in effective wavelength, but which is so broad it corresponds to no obvious sum of standard bandpasses. For lack of a better designation, we have chosen to designate such unfiltered data as U. While this could be confused with Johnson or Bessel U, in practical terms we are safe to adopt this internally because nobody in their right mind takes U data of Galactic Bulge microlensing events. We choose not to designate these as "C" for Clear, because for some observers they really do use a clear filter to parfocalize their filter wheel, while others have no filter at all, hence "Unfiltered" or "U" for short.