The Lick AGN Monitoring Project:  Information and Data Release

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project collaboration has carried out reverberation mapping programs at the Lick Observatory 3-m telescope since 2008.  Our projects have used spectroscopic data obtained using the Kast Spectrograph at Lick, and imaging data from a variety of telescopes including the Katzman Automated Imaging Telescope and the Nickel Telescope at Lick, the LCOGT network, the West Mountain Observatory 0.9-m, the Palomar 60-inch telescope, the Super-LOTIS telescope, the Tenagra Observatory, the MAGNUM telescope, and Mt. Laguna Observatory.

Our projects to date have included:

Publications from our Lick reverberation projects:

Other related publications by team members involving results from our Lick projects and data analysis methods:


Public Release of 2008 Spectroscopic Data

Our reduced spectroscopic data from the 2008 program are now available to the community. The description of the observations and reductions is given in this paper: Bentz et al. 2009.  All of the spectroscopic data reductions were done by Misty Bentz.

Data format:  For each AGN there are two tar files, with names such as arp151.com.tar and arp151.scale.tar.  The "com" file contains the reduced spectra. In most cases this is from two exposures taken back-to-back and combined together into a final reduced spectrum.  The "scale" file contains the scaled spectra after application of the spectral scaling method used to normalize the flux calibration of the spectra to a consistent scale.  The file name for each spectrum contains four digits representing the month and day of observation.  The spectra themselves are in ASCII format with three columns giving wavelength, flux density (in f-lambda units of 10^-15 erg/s/cm^2/A), and uncertainty on the flux density. In each tar file there is also an "info" file which lists the seeing (in arcseconds), airmass, and HJD for each exposure.  The seeing is measured from standard star observations and may differ from the seeing when the AGN was observed. Note that in the unscaled spectra, the overall flux scale of each night's data is essentially random, depending on the relative amount of cloud cover between the AGN and the standard star observations. Light curves should not be measured from the unscaled spectra. Also note that the error bars on line flux are the propagated photon-counting uncertainties only, and do not include additional uncertainties due to errors in the spectral scaling. The additional flux-scaling uncertainty for a given AGN can be estimated by measuring the scatter in the [OIII] light curve from the scaled spectra (f_var), since any scatter in the [OIII] light curve (over and above the amount expected from photon-counting errors) can be attributed to residual flux scaling errors.

Any use of these data in a published work must carry the following acknowledgement:
"This work has made use of data from the Lick AGN Monitoring Project public data release."

Additionally, any paper making use of these data is required to include a citation to Bentz et al. 2009 (see link above), plus any additional papers from the above list that are relevant for the specific research being described.

Light curve data are given in tabular form in the electronic versions of the papers listed above.  This includes the H-beta light curves (Bentz et al. 2009), other broad-line light curves (Bentz et al. 2010), and B and V band photometry (Walsh et al. 2009).

All of the spectra are contained here in a single tar file (13.3 MB size).

Any questions about the 2008 spectroscopic data should be directed to Aaron Barth and/or Misty Bentz.

Collaborators

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project team includes a very large number of people, eventually to be listed here with links to everyone.  The names of project members can be found in the author lists of the publications listed above.

Acknowledgements

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project has been supported at various times by the following:

We're especially grateful to the staff at Lick Observatory for their outstanding and tireless support during our observing runs.

Our project has benefited tremendously from the contributions and efforts of our late friend and collaborator Weidong Li.