Twittering transient event messages Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After sitting through Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron's talk on Disaster Tech at ETech last month in San Diego, and listening to them talk about Twitter, I finally 'got it'.

The currently supported protocols for VOEvent clients. Roughly divided into the push protocols; vanilla TCP and Jabber, and the pull protocols; RSS and KML. Twitter sits somewhere in between these two classes, as it can be used in both push mode via a mobile device, or in pull mode via the website.

So to go along with the TCP and RSS and KML event feeds, I'd like to point people at the new eSTAR Twitter feed. Right now the feed is only carrying automatically generated tweets alerting you to new transient events such as Gamma Ray Bursts, Microlensing Events and SNe Candidates. But I'm going to be plumbing Twitter into the heart of eSTAR over the next week or so, soon you'll be able to know not only when interesting things are happening, but also what telescopes are responding to those events, and what they're seeing. All in real time...