Automatized photometric monitoring of active galactic nuclei with the 46 cm telescope of the Wise observatory

Abstract

We present the first results of an ongoing variability monitoring program of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) using the 46\,cm telescope of the Wise observatory in Israel. The telescope has a field of view of $1.25^{\circ }\times 0.84^{\circ }$ and is specially equipped with five narrow band filters at 4300, 5200, 5700, 6200 and 7000\,Å\, in order to perform photometric reverberation mapping studies of the central engine of AGNs. The program aims to observe a sample of 27 AGNs (V $<17$ mag) selected according to tentative continuum and line time delay measurements obtained in previous works. We describe the autonomous operation of the telescope together with the fully automatic pipeline used to achieve high-performance unassisted observations, data reduction, and light curves extraction using different photometric methods. The science verification data presented here, demonstrates the performance of the monitoring program in particular for efficiently photometric reverberation mapping of AGNs with additional capabilities to carry out complementary studies of other transient and variable phenomena such as variable stars studies.

14 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in PASP

References in corpus (5)

• Testing thermal reprocessing in AGN accretion discs
• Reverberation Measurements of the Inner Radius of the Dust Torus in 17 Seyfert Galaxies
• Photometric reverberation mapping of 3C120
• The Centurion 18 telescope of the Wise Observatory
• Quasar optical variability: searching for interband time delays

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Modeling photometric reverberation mapping data for the next generation of big data surveys. Quasar accretion disks sizes with the LSST
• Continuum reverberation mapping of the quasar PG 2130+099
• Stokes-polarimeter for 1-meter telescope
• Disentangling the optical AGN and Host-galaxy luminosity with a probabilistic Flux Variation Gradient
• Photometric reverberation mapping of AGNs at 0.1 < z < 0.8: I. Observational technique
• Accretion disc reverberation mapping in a high-redshift quasar
• HALO I: Photometric continuum reverberation mapping of Fairall 9
• Medium-band photometric reverberation mapping of AGNs at $0.1<z<0.8$. Techniques and sample
• Reevaluating LSST's Capability for Time Delay Measurements in Quasar Accretion Discs