CFHT Gravitational Wave Follow-up Pipeline Development

Nicole Ford ( Université McGill )

The LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave observatories' Observing Run 4 is scheduled to start in December 2022, and is expected to detect gravitational wave signals from ~10 new NS-NS and NS-BH mergers. Rapid telescope follow-up of these mergers will obtain light curves and spectra of the first sample of kilonovae. We plan to use CFHT’s MegaCam and WIRCam to search for these kilonova counterparts; to prepare for this search, I have incorporated several improvements to our follow-up image reduction software pipeline. I will discuss several of these improvements, including the generation of tiling maps and ranked galaxy target lists customized for CFHT and optimized to cover the gravitational wave localization map.