The Release of PESSTO SSDR4

PESSTO SSDR4 has now been released via the ESO Science Portal and includes all EFOSC and SOFI spectra and SOFI images from the full 7 years of PESSTO and ePESSTO operations; April 2012 to April 2019. Also included is an updated version of the transient catalogue covering the same time period. In total the entire data-set comes to 45GB of reduced data-products.

The release comprises of 2323 unique transient sources including supernovae, galactic-novae, tidal disruption events and observations of the first kilonova ever discovered (AT2017gfo). Alongside observations used for spectral classification of many of these transient sources, rich time-series data-sets can be found for 337 select science targets (3748 spectral frame in total).

PESSTO time-series data-set for SN2017cfo; an unusual Type II supernova classified by PESSTO. The plot shows the first spectrum has a hot blue continuum even at 14 days after the estimated explosion epoch. The 4 subsequent EFOSC Gr13 spectra acquired during a follow-up campaign illustrate its transformation to a type II, with strong hydrogen lines visible at z = 0.042. The bottom panel presents a rendering of one of the spectra in 2-dimensions (wavelength in the left-to-right plane and along the slit from top-to-bottom). The sky-lines visible in the 2D frames have clearly been successfully removed from the fully-reduced spectra by the PESSTO data-reduction pipeline.

The release description for PESSTO SSDR4 can be found here and it’s possible to access the data via the ESO Science Portal or programmatically.