ZChecker: Finding Cometary Outbursts with the Zwicky Transient Facility

ZChecker is new, automated software for finding, measuring, and visualizing known comets in the Zwicky Transient Facility time-domain survey. ZChecker uses on-line ephemeris generation and survey metadata to identify images of targets of interest in the archive. Photometry of each target is measured, and the images processed with temporal filtering to highlight morphological variations in time. Example outputs show outbursts of comets 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 and 64P/Swift-Gehrels, and an asymmetric coma at C/2017 M4 (ATLAS).