AstroNote 2023-53

ATLAS is a quadruple 0.5m telescope system with two units in Hawaii (Haleakala and Mauna Loa), and one each in Chile (El Sauce) and South Africa (Sutherland), see  Tonry et al. 2018, (PASP,130:064505). With the installation of the two southern units, we are robotically surveying the whole sky with a cadence of 1 day between -50 and +50 and 2 days in the polar regions, weather permitting. Two filters are used, cyan and orange (denoted c and o; all mags quoted are in the AB system). While carrying out the primary mission for Near-Earth Objects, we search for and publicly report stationary transients to the IAU Transient Name Server.  Data processing is carried out at Queen's University which combines automated source parameter filtering, machine learning image recognition, and spatial cross-matching with astronomical catalogues (Smith et al. 2020, PASP, 132:085002). More information is on the ATLAS homepage. We are submitting AstroNotes for transients that are either within 100 Mpc, or have some other interesting feature to bring to the community's attention, such as bright nuclear transients, slowly rising or rapidly fading objects.

We report a new transient source, possibly a bright nova, LBV or very young supernova in the galaxy Messier 064. We discovered ATLAS23ddk (AT2023cqt) on MJD 60004.00 == 2023-03-01.00, at m_o = 18.80 +/- 0.19. There was no detection by ATLAS on MJD 60001.59 == 2023-02-26.59. (See attached forced photometry plot.) ATLAS23ddk is offset by 72.9 arcsec south, 47.7 arcsec east from Messier 064, which is at z = 0.001 or d = 6 Mpc (from NED), implying an absolute magnitude of M = -10.1 (assuming m-M = 28.83 and A_r = 0.09 and A_i = 0.07).

In addition, we observed the field of ATLAS23ddk (AT2023cqt) using the 40cm-SLT at Lulin Observatory, Taiwan, to obtain g,r,i-band images as part of the Kinder collaboration (Chen et al., AstroNote 2021-92). Observations started at 20:55 UT on 2023-03-01 (MJD = 60004.872), 0.87 days after the ATLAS discovery. The transient is clearly detected in all bands and confirms this new source. (See attached screenshot.)

Followup observations are encouraged.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project is primarily funded to search for Near-Earth asteroids through NASA grants NN12AR55G, 80NSSC18K0284, and 80NSSC18K1575; byproducts of the NEO search include images and catalogs from the survey area. This work was partially funded by Kepler/K2 grant J1944/80NSSC19K0112 and HST GO-15889, and STFC grants ST/T000198/1 and ST/S006109/1. The ATLAS science products have been made possible through the contributions of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, the Queen's University Belfast, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the South African Astronomical Observatory, and The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS), Chile.