Welcome to SALVATION's Webpage

SALVATION is aimed at multi-epoch spectroscopic monitoring of bright variable sources and spectroscopic follow up of transients in our neighboring Andromeda galaxy (M31) and other nearby galaxies. Our workhorse is the Lick Observatory's Shane 3-m telescope equipped with the Kast spectrograph. We currently harvest our targets from the public alerts of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) time-domain survey using the ANTARES event-broker.

The majority of these targets consists of eruptive variables like classical novae and red novae, as well as massive stars like luminous blue variables and yellow and red supergiants. We spectroscopically monitor these sources, shadowing their photometric variability observations from ZTF, with the main scientific objective of providing insights into the underlying, ill-constrained physical processes, e.g., stellar wind, pulsation, and convection.

As part of the same project we also target some extragalactic transients (mainly supernovae) from the ANTARES output streams for early classification and notification to the community (e.g., via Astronomer’s Telegrams).