Publications from our Lick reverberation projects:
Other related publications by
team members involving results from our Lick projects and data
analysis methods:
Public Release of 2008 Spectroscopic Data
Our reduced spectroscopic data
from the 2008 program are now available to the community. The
description of the observations and reductions is given in
this paper: Bentz
et al. 2009. All of the spectroscopic data
reductions were done by Misty Bentz.
Data format: For each AGN there are two tar files, with names such as arp151.com.tar and arp151.scale.tar. The "com" file contains the reduced spectra. In most cases this is from two exposures taken back-to-back and combined together into a final reduced spectrum. The "scale" file contains the scaled spectra after application of the spectral scaling method used to normalize the flux calibration of the spectra to a consistent scale. The file name for each spectrum contains four digits representing the month and day of observation. The spectra themselves are in ASCII format with three columns giving wavelength, flux density (in f-lambda units of 10^-15 erg/s/cm^2/A), and uncertainty on the flux density. In each tar file there is also an "info" file which lists the seeing (in arcseconds), airmass, and HJD for each exposure. The seeing is measured from standard star observations and may differ from the seeing when the AGN was observed. Note that in the unscaled spectra, the overall flux scale of each night's data is essentially random, depending on the relative amount of cloud cover between the AGN and the standard star observations. Light curves should not be measured from the unscaled spectra. Also note that the error bars on line flux are the propagated photon-counting uncertainties only, and do not include additional uncertainties due to errors in the spectral scaling. The additional flux-scaling uncertainty for a given AGN can be estimated by measuring the scatter in the [OIII] light curve from the scaled spectra (f_var), since any scatter in the [OIII] light curve (over and above the amount expected from photon-counting errors) can be attributed to residual flux scaling errors.
Any use of these data in a
published work must carry the following acknowledgement:
"This work has made use of data from the Lick AGN Monitoring
Project public data release."
Additionally, any paper making
use of these data is required to include a citation to Bentz
et al. 2009 (see link above), plus any additional papers from
the above list that are relevant for the specific research
being described.
Light curve data are given in
tabular form in the electronic versions of the papers listed
above. This includes the H-beta light curves (Bentz et
al. 2009), other broad-line light curves (Bentz et al. 2010),
and B and V band photometry (Walsh et al. 2009).
All of the spectra are contained
here in a single tar file
(13.3 MB size).
Any questions about the 2008
spectroscopic data should be directed to Aaron Barth and/or Misty Bentz.
Collaborators
The Lick AGN Monitoring Project
team includes a very large number of people, eventually to be
listed here with links to everyone. The names of project
members can be found in the author lists of the publications
listed above.
Acknowledgements
The Lick AGN Monitoring Project
has been supported at various times by the following:
We're especially grateful to the
staff at Lick Observatory for their outstanding and tireless
support during our observing runs.
Our project has benefited
tremendously from the contributions and efforts of our late
friend and collaborator Weidong Li.