GW Astrology

Statement of Purpose

Disclaimer: We are physicists NOT astrologers, you should not plan your life on our horoscopes

This is pop cultural scientific activity. The purpose is to alert people of gravitational waves in a fun way, by using astrology. Subscribers will receive alerts of gravitational waves including a fact sheet of basic event info, a "GW birth chart" and horoscope.

Design

GW Birth Chart

• Sun sign: map RA/Dec to constellation and assign sun sign
• Rising: map time of coalescence to rising sign
• Moon: map time and highest SNR detector location to moon sign

Astrological Weather Report

Given GW event time, calculate the sun and moon's current sky position, maybe other things. Generate a horoscope from this information.

• start with an adlib horoscope template
• an array of fill-in words
• map sun, moon, etc. current sky position to index
  • aquarius = index + 0
  • pisces = index + 1
  • etc.
• use those words to fill in the horoscope

Instructions

1. Set up SCiMMA credentials by following instructions here: https://computing.docs.ligo.org/igwn-alert/client/guide.html#managing-credentials-and-topics
2. In your run dir do make env then source env.sh
3. After you have been added to the lvk-users group and created a credential, download the csv file and in your run dir do: hop auth add <csv file>
4. Run the listener: python3 igwn-alert-listener