[AstroPy] fourpiskytools - simple Python examples for sending and receiving VOEvents

[Tim Staley]

Hi all,

if any of you are working on follow-up of transient events, you might be 
interested in a package I've just put together:

https://github.com/timstaley/fourpiskytools

The package aims to provide a 'minimum working example' of how one might 
get started working with VOEvents, that can be easily adapted for your 
specific needs.

VOEvents are the standardised format for distributing alerts (gamma-ray 
burst here, detected in optical, etc etc), and are intended to be 
machine readable, as opposed to the current typical method of posting 
human-written reports as ATels or on a dedicated project website. The 
transport protocol uses a 'keep-alive' connection, so they're also 
pretty low-latency (compared with e.g. sending emails). Finally, as 
compared to say NASA-GCN, they are flexible enough to be adapted for 
many different telescopes, and support a decentralised publication model.

The hope is that if we can get more teams on-board and using VOEvent, it 
opens up a slew of possibilities for rapid event classification and 
targeted follow-up.

Note that fourpiskytools is built on voevent-parse 
(http://voevent-parse.readthedocs.org/en/master/), a package for which 
I'm currently considering how best to integrate the astropy core 
functionality, so if that would be useful to you and you'd like to see 
it soon then drop a note on the relevant issue:
https://github.com/timstaley/voevent-parse/issues/2

Happy transient hunting!

-Tim