Active Learning System for iPTF Candidate Classification

The Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) is a visible-spectrum astronomy survey aimed at detecting “transient” events such as supernovae. Every night, a telescope at the Palomar observatory collects images of various regions of the sky and compares them to a set of reference images taken on previous nights. The image comparison is done via a subtraction process. The reference images are subtracted from the new nightly images, and any remaining light sources are flagged as candidate transient events.