Today in PASP, I jointly led a paper describing electromagnetic follow-up of a gravitational wave event with the Wide-Field Transient Explorer (WINTER).
This had one of the smallest localisations of any gravitational event in LIGO’s O4 observing run, and we were able to tile it efficiently with WINTER’s 1 sq. deg. field of view.
Unfortunately we did not find any candidate counterparts, which was consistent with findings from other telescopes and expectations from modelling.
We also describe our infrastructure for tiling events and identifying candidates. With the API framework I built, WINTER can begin observing within minutes of a trigger. I led efforts to indentify candidate counterparts with WINTER data. We have more than 11000 candidates from our search, but all can be ruled out through my cross-matching and analysis framework.
Though no counterpart was discovered this time around, we remain ready for the next exciting trigger!