Realtime alerts of the transient sky on mobile devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces Astro-COLIBRI, a mobile tool that provides real-time alerts for transient astronomical events, enhancing follow-up observations through instant notifications and data visualization on smartphones.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive architecture for real-time transient alerts, integrating databases, APIs, and mobile apps for immediate user notification and event assessment.

Findings

Effective real-time alert delivery via mobile devices

Integration of observatory data for observing conditions

Enhanced coordination in transient follow-up observations

Abstract

Follow-up observations of transient events are crucial in multimessenger astronomy. We present Astro-COLIBRI as a tool that informs users about flaring events in real-time via push notifications on their mobile phones, thus contributing to enhanced coordination of follow-up observations. We show the software's architecture that comprises a REST API, both a static and a real-time database, a cloud-based alert system, as well as a website and apps for iOS and Android as clients for users. The latter provide a graphical representation with a summary of the relevant data to allow for the fast identification of interesting phenomena along with an assessment of observing conditions at a large selection of observatories around the world in real-time.