Change Log¶

Version 7 (2019-03-02)¶

Observing Capabilities

Procedures

Add Gravitational Wave/High Energy Neutrino search to the list of multi-messenger search pipelines.

Sample Code

Add instructions for installing required packages using the Anaconda Python distribution.

Alert Contents

Switch to the GW170817 Hanford-Livingston-Virgo localization for the example sky map.

Alert Contents

Add a human-readable description to the Pkt_Ser_Num parameter.
Add <EventIVORN cite="supersedes"> elements to the sample Initial and Update notices in order to cite all prior VOEvents. GraceDB already includes this metadata, but it was missing from the examples.
Add MassGap classification for compact binary mergers.

General

Changed the contact email to <emfollow-userguide@support.ligo.org> because some mail clients had trouble with the slash in the old contact email address, <contact+emfollow/userguide@support.ligo.org>. (The old address will also still work.)

Getting Started Checklist

Observing Capabilities

Update planned dates for Engineering Run 14 (ER14; starts 2019-03-04) and Observing Run 3 (O3; starts 2019-04-01).
Add Live Status section, listing some public web pages that provide real-time detector status.

Sample Code

Update the example GCN notice handler so that it does not fail if the notice is missing a sky map, because as we have specified them, LVC_RETRACTION notices never contain sky maps and LVC_PRELIMINARY notices may or may not contain sky maps.
When building the documentation, test all of the sample code automatically.

Alert Contents

Remove the skymap_png parameter from the VOEVents. The sky map plots take longer to generate than the FITS files themselves, so they would have needlessly delayed the preliminary alerts.
Change the IVORN prefix from ivo://gwnet/gcn_sender to ivo://gwnet/LVC, because GCN traditionally uses the text after the / to indicate the name of the mission, which most closely corresponds to “LVC,” short for “LIGO/Virgo Collaboration.” Note that this IVORN is used for historical purposes and continuity with the GCN notice format used in O1 and O2, and is likely to change in the future with the commissioning of additional gravitational-wave facilities.
Retraction notices now get a separate GCN notice packet type, LVC_RETRACTION=164. The Retraction parameter has been removed from the <What> section.

Alert Contents

Removed the Vetted parameter from GCN Notices. It was intended to indicate whether the event had passed human vetting. However, it was redundant beacuse by definition Preliminary events have not been vetted and all Initial and Update alerts have been vetted.
The type of the Retraction parameter in the GCN Notices was changed from a string (false or true) to an integer (0 or 1) for consistency with other flag-like parameters.
Remove the units attribute from parameters that are not numbers.

Sample Code

GCN has now begun publicly broadcasting sample LIGO/Virgo GCN Notices. Updated the sample code accordingly with instructions for receiving live sample notices.

Getting Started Checklist

Observing Capabilities

Changed the expected number of BNS events in O3 from 1-50, as stated in the latest version of the Living Review, to 1-10 events, as stated in the more recent rates presentation.

Alert Contents

In the example VOEvents, moved the Classification and Inference quantities from the <Why> section to the <What> section so that they validate against the VOEvent 2.0 schema.