| Friday March 3 |
11AM |
Daniela Dorner Würzburg University |
Monitoring TeV Blazars with FACT |
Active galactic nuclei are highly variable objects. To study the variability on time scales from minutes to years and understand the underlying emission processes, continuous long-term monitoring is crucial. The First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope (FACT) is a small imaging air Cherenkov telescope observing at TeV energies. It is pioneering the use of solid state photosensors (silicon photomultipliers aka G-APDs) in ground-based gamma-ray astronomy. To get an unbiased data sample, a small set of sources is observed as much as possible. The presentation will give an introduction to the instrument and discuss how the use of silicon photomultipliers and the automatic operation, minimize the gaps in the light curves and maximize the duty cycle of the instrument. Results from more than five years of monitoring will be summarized including flaring activities of the blazars Mrk 421, Mrk 501 and 1ES 1959+650. |
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