Transient Events app for iPhone and iPad

The heavens are much more dynamic than most people realize. Every night stars and galaxies vary in brightness and comets move through our solar system. The astronomy community now has survey telescopes monitoring the sky on a regular basis looking for objects which vary in brightness or position in the night sky. The images from these telescopes are analyzed automatically and variable objects are published through the Skyalert system. Transient Events provides an easy to use application to monitor these events. You can quickly set the types and brightness of events of interested and Transient Events will download events which meet your criteria from the Skyalert database. Touch an event of interest and you can see a reference image and the 4 science images which caused the object to be discovered. Professional and amateur astronomers will appreciate the Right Ascension and Declination coordinates as well as the finder chart which can be used to point their telescope at the object. Transient Events also uses the current location of the user to determine if the object if interest is currently above the horizon.

The Transient Events application has the option of enabling notifications so that users can receive push notifications shortly after the moment of discovery.

Transient Events currently receives events from the Catalina Real Time Survey utilizing data taken by the three dedicated telescopes of the highly successful Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) NEO project. http://crts.caltech.edu/

Creation of the Transient Events application was funded by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project (www.lsst.org). The real-time event discovery, processing, and dissemination of events is made possible by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant NNG05GF22G (Catalina Sky survey, http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/), and by the National Science Foundation under grants AST-0909182 (Catalina Real Time  Transient Survey, http://crts.caltech.edu/) and OCI-0915473 (Skyalert, http://skyalert.org).

FEATURES
•Notifications alert you of transient events shortly after they are discovered.
•Easily select the types of objects of interest by event class, brightness and age
•Use location services or select a location from a list of observatories and the application will compute if the object is currently above the horizon
•View the actual science images and compare the to the reference image
•The right ascension and declination as well as altitude and azimuth coordinates are provided for each event
•Bookmark and store interesting events on your device so that they can be viewed when network connectivity is unavailable.