Motivations

Initial development of Ampel was motivated by the desire to properly process the hundres of thousands of alerts that was expected from the Zwicky Transient Facility every night. The previous generation of surveys (such as e.g. SDSS, SNfactory, PS, ASAS-SN) consists of O(100) objects in the final samples and still have their scientific yield limited by limitations to how follow-up candidates were selected, whether this process could be tracked and how higher level data products (e.g. calibrated lightcurves) could be compared with the set of initial detections. It was clear that a new generation of photometric surveys warranted a new set of tools for dealing with large samples of objects. These tools grew into the Ampel project.

Ampel quickly grew distinct from the initial ZTF use cases and is today development independent of these as general tool for managing transient information.