Identifying Supernovae with SALT

One advantage of SALT's queue-based scheduling is its flexibility in allowing Time-of-Opportunity (ToO) observations. Our ability to quickly follow up on and then monitor T Pyx has been a great example of this. This was a rather special case, however, because it was a very special event that occurred at the very beginning of our re-commissioning period. We would like to make handling ToO observations as routine and responsive as possible. Toward that end we have a couple of commissioning proposals from within the SALT partnership to do rapid spectroscopic follow-up of supernovae. The first fruits of these has come in the form of a successful ID of the supernova PSN J18435900-6159460 by D. Milisavljevic and R. Fesen (Dartmouth) which has been announced at http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=3404. Here is a plot of the SALT spectrum with an overlay of the model used to make the identification as a Type Ia.