Swift SN TOO recommendations

This post gives you some of the background of Swift Targets of Opportunity (ToOs).  Below I give some recommendations for SN ToOs.



Urgency of First Observation:  High Urgency(Observation needed within 24 hours.) 

[ For most SNe, getting the first observation as soon as possible is desirable and a few days can make a significant difference in the early color evolution of SNe.  Often the first observation can take place within a few hours.  Early observations are also helpful in being able to schedule grism observations and such for bright SNe.  If the SN is already old, than a lower urgency is of course more reasonable.  ]

Campaign Type:  Multiple Observations

Scientific Justification:  [here is a sample justification for a young, newly discovered SN of unknown type.  If the type is known, a few more sentences of justification could be added as to what this particular SN would be used for, but the justification doesn't have to be very long. If it's the right type and near enough that X-rays might be detected, that could be added/factored into the exposure time request. ]

SN2013ZZ is a newly discovered SN in the nearby galaxy NGCZZZZ.  Based on pre-discovery limits, the SN is less than one week past explosion.  At this distance, early UV observations of SNe of any type are useful, for example constraining the size of a type Ia progenitor companion (Nugent et al. 2011, Brown et al. 2012) or the UV contribution to the bolometric luminosity (Pritchard et al. 2012).

Number of Requested Visits: 10
Average Exposure Time Per Visit: 2000 sec  [normally for SNe Ia 2 ks for z<0.01, 3 ks for z~0.02, 5 ks for z~0.03 using the UV-weighted mode 0x223f]
Time Between Each Visit: 2 days [a two day cadence gives good light curve coverage if there are no interruptions and an okay coverage if an observation is occasionally skipped due to oversubscription or clobbered by a gamma ray burst or too upload]

XRT mode: Photon Counting

UVOT mode: UV+optical
[Even if you are only interested in the X-ray data, the UV data is likely valuable to someone.  I strongly urge you to request multi-filter UV observations.  I can look at the data if you like and recommend switching modes if justified.  This post describes the recommended modes in more detail.]

UVOT mode justification:

[ The below text can be just pasted into the box.  ]

Multi-filter observations are required to measure the evolving UV/optical SED and for comparison with high redshift SNe observed in the optical.

We would like to use the 6 broadband filters (uvw2,uvm2,uvw1,u,b,v) heavily weighted to the uvm2 for better mid-UV sensitivity.   If appropriate, please use UVOT mode 0x0270 for a ToO upload (needs some snapshots longer than 1000 sec to get all six filters) and 0x223f in the PPST to weight the time heavily to the UV.