Monitoring of variable sources, X-ray binaries and AGN, at 15 GHz

The Ryle Telescope has been used from time to time for monitoring variable sources, including GRS 1915+105, Cygnus X-1 and Cygnus X-3.

The basic parameters of the system are described in Pooley & Fender (1997, MNRAS, 292, 925-933). In order to make the data available for other observers to assess the current state of the system, some files (in postscript or gzipped postscript format) are available for GRS1915+105, Cygnus X-1, Cygnus X-3 and for J1118+480 (on a "best efforts" basis) for consultation.

For some sources there are many plots, organised by date:
filenames including yyyy.ps are for the whole of year yyyy,
those with yymm.ps are for month mm in year yy,
and yymmdd.ps for single days.

Many of these plots also include data from the RXTE All-sky monitor which are gratefully acknowledged.

There is also a table of data on GRB021004, and plots for GRB030329 and the blazar B1428+422 = J1430+4204

From June 2006, a major upgrade of the telescope has been undertaken.
The instrument is now transformed into the "AMI large array": see the AMI pages for details.
There was therefore be a pause in the monitoring (and other) observations until operations with the Large Array started in earnest in 2008.
See the paper (pdf file here) presented at the 6th microquasar workshop. Similar data are now being collected and some are now available on the web site. We collect data over a wider spectral band, and with higher sensitivity and time-resolution, although not all of these are yet available for general use.