I have been having some discussions with my colleague Michael Fausnaugh at Texas Tech about something that might be an interesting thing to try through HEN. It’s probably only worth doing if a bunch of people are interested in working together on it. The idea is to see if we can localize gamma-ray bursts seen with the Fermi satellite using AAVSO members’ telescopes.
Fermi detects a lot of gamma-ray bursts, but it doesn’t do direct imaging, so they are almost never localized to better than a few degrees. Some of them are much worse localized than that, even.
What may be interesting to try is to take some of the best cases from Fermi, where the burst was bright, so that it’s probably more nearby than usual, and so the localization is good, and see if we can get 10 or so people to coordinate to tile the localization region and see if they find an optical transient that could be the afterglow.
There are still some logistics to work out here, but probably it takes going to 17th magnitude or so on the same day as the burst to be able to do something really useful.
For people interested in this, there are lots of resources on the HEN website.
A good starting point is with the “Time Domain Astrophysics” link shown on the right-hand side of the HEN page under High Energy Network. This outlines procedures for observing GRBs including use of the GCN (Gamma-ray Coordinate Network), Astronomer’s Telegram (ATel), and many other things. Additionally, it would be advantageous to watch the February 5, 2022 video presented by Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein on these topics. Finally, check out the NASA Fermi website which can be located on the “Observatories” link on the HEN website. There is an incredible amount of information here and is a good starting point to actually use Fermi data to plan observations and process collected data.
If there are any questions, issues, ideas please contact me.
It would be a useful thing to do as a primary project for a reasonably large telescope or three or four distributed well in longitude. Any other observing would be secondary to the transient follow up program.
I know of at least one 24-inch that was purchased for the specific mission of rapid follow-up of transient objects like what you describe. Problem with that telescope is the annual funding probably died a long time ago, it is now mostly used for student projects at a university, now shared time like AAVSOnet so you rarely get observations and on demand would be impossible now, and it is located on the East coast USA and the weather over the last 5 to 7 years has been untennable for almost any astronomy with any size OTA.
You still will have the longitude hole in central asia unless you can recruit someone there.
My thought is that the thing that really requires a lot of telescopes is localization, so that everyone can observe slightly different patches. And the early afterglows usually fade slowly enough to deal with the central Asia gap, although there are some small robotic telescopes in the Emirates now, and I think there must be some telescopes in India, so that covers things well.