A watchlist is a set of points in the sky, together with a radius in arcseconds. It is assumed to be a list of "interesting" sources, so that any transient that falls within the radius of one of the sources might indicate activity of that source. Each user of the Lasair system has their own set of watchlists, and can be alerted when a ZTF transient is coincident with a watchlist source.
You can create a watchlist of sources by preparing a text file, where each comma-separated or |-separated line has RA and Dec in decimal degrees, an identifier, with optional radius in arcseconds. One way to do this is with Vizier and a spreadsheet program such as Excel or Numbers. Here is an example of the data. The 42 entries are BL Lac candidates for TeV observations (Massaro+, 2013)
An "Active" watchlist is one that is run every day, so that it is up to date with the latest objects.
To create your own watchlists, you must log in.Public Watchlists
Watchlists created and made public are listed below. Click on the name of the watchlist for more information and crossmatching.| Name | Owner | Description | Radius | Active |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cataclysmic Variables | Roy Williams | Catalog of Cataclysmic Variables (Downes+ 2001-2006) Vizier V/123A | 0.2 arcsec | |
| BL Lac for TeV | Roy Williams | BL Lac candidates for TeV observations (Massaro+, 2013) | 1.0 arcsec | |
| AM CVn | Roy Williams | These are 56 very close binaries of compact objects, from "The physical properties of AM CVn stars: new insights from Gaia DR2", Ramsay et al 2018 A&A 620A 141 | 1.0 arcsec | ✔ |
| AM Her | Gavin Ramsay | Magnetic CVs (B>10MG). some go into prolonged low states. see Cropper 1990 SSRv 54 195. Objects marked with an asterix indicate its eclipsing and 'A' indicates asynchronous | 5.0 arcsec | ✔ |
| Stripe82 AGN | Nicholas Ross | A WatchList for the 24,790 objects from the MilliQuas catalog that have spectroscopic IDs on the Stripe 82 region. | 2.0 arcsec | ✔ |
| Abell Clusters | Roy Williams | Abells catalog of galaxy clusters https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989ApJS...70....1A | 115.0 arcsec | ✔ |
| Giant Binaries | Heidi Thiemann | Catalogue of near contact red giant eclipsing binary candidates (possible novae progenitors). | 10.0 arcsec | ✔ |
| IPs | Gavin Ramsay | Intermediate Polars | 2.0 arcsec | ✔ |
| E+A galaxies | Matt Nicholl | French & Zabludoff 2018 | 1.0 arcsec | ✔ |