[vsnet-chat 7609] panstarrian

[substelor at Safe-mail.net]

There've been some threads over on MPML (Minor Planet Mailing List, it's a yahoo group list) in the past about PANSTARRS and what it claims it can do, including some posts by PANSTARR affiliiates/staff etc who have openly noted that some of the claimes with respect to 'killer asteroids' were not only exaggerated by the press releases, but were (as some critics had claimed on MPML) actually technically impossible in terms of how PANSTARRS works.

When it comes to supernovae I don't know how well they are doing, I think there's been at least on ATel false alarm there, but such stuff is a matter of interpretation between professionals and groups at times, at least until high resolution conifrming (or contradicting) spectra become available.

However, as someone who's seen a lot of optical lightcurves of Blazars and AGN from Stripe82 data, and also UV ones from GALEX, and also read papers on more commonly known and well followed (often by amateurs) objects of that sort, I find ATEL 2784 interesting.

http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=2784

That is, that most claimed transients there are just normal optical variability within these sorts of objects (the clue really is in the amplitude, AGN and Blazars are actually quite variable and a magnitude or two level, on all timescales, as well as at times actually _outbursting_ eruptively and/or cataclysmically (the latter is actually quite rare, and more to do with beaming in the jets and incident line of sight and the like most of the time, rather than major physical events).

It all makes it harder work for the observer to pick out the transients that are truly transient and in need of quick and timely follow up.

John