News:
Read about Filipp Romanov's discovery of a supernova
in the CRTS supernova hunt project in Newsweek.
CRTS-II transient candidates are no longer being processed.
CRTS Transient Discoveries:
Image: © Axel Mellinger
Current Observing Weather: Mt. Lemmon 
.
More News:
Data Release The Catalina Periodic Variable catalog is available here.
You can access the extended lightcurves of 500 million sources in CSDR2.
CRTS FU Ori's.
CRTS collaborates with LSST on iPhone event app.
CACR
and UA news, featured in
astronomy.com,
redorbit,
skynightly,
spaceref,
astronomynow. Article on Catalina discoveries in
Forbes.
Read about the Catalina data release in Sky and Telescope.
The Survey
Introduction
The Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey is a synoptic astronomical exploration that
covers thirty three thousand square degrees
of the sky in order discover rare and interesting transient phenomina. The survey utilizes data taken by
the three dedicated telescopes of the
highly successful Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) NEO project.
CRTS detects and openly publishes all transients within minutes of observation so that all astronomers may
follow ongoing events.
Automated Analysis
CRTS builds on the work performed for the Palomar Quest
survey and continues to pave the way for deeper upcoming transient surveys (LSST),
by automating the event discovery and classification processes so that robust decisions can enable intelligent
human and robotic follow up.
Rapid Response
In order to fully understand rapidly varying transient astronomical behaviour, automated alerting and
follow-up is a necessity. Rapid transient science is enabled by the affiliated projects
VOEventNet and SkyAlert.
- VOEventNet is a means of transporting astronomical events to interested subscribers, automatically within minutes of discovery.
- SkyAlert enables users to perform complex queries about discoveries in order to receive personally tailored
and filtered event streams.
CRTS also publishes VOEvents directly to the general public via
Google Sky in
kml.
Survey Telescopes
The three telescopes used by CRTS.
Open Data
CRTS has made the entire CSS
photometric dataset public as a service to the astronomical community.
Images are in the process of being released. Meanwhile requests for images
can be made to us directly.
If you intend to make use CRTS data in a publication, please cite:
Drake, A.J. et al. First Results from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey,
2009, ApJ, 696, 870.
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