This (northern) summer I visited colleagues at DTU Space, Denmark and SRON, Netherlands to continue work on the Multi-INstrument Burst ARchive (MINBAR). We're currently preparing for the first data release (DR1), and we made a lot of progress with the data analysis and assembly of the companion paper. We also got to celebrate the deployment of NICER to the International Space Station, although because of a delay our celebration was a little early!

Unexpectedly, the careful eye of Jean in 't Zand identified a handful of bursts observed by RXTE from a 2008-9 transient, XTE J1812-182, that was not previously known to be a burster. We reported our discovery in Astronomer's Telegram #10567 and will shortly present a more detailed analysis via a paper. While this is a very pleasing outcome from the meeting, it now means there are even more bursts to analyse for MINBAR!

Labels: 2017, thermonuclear bursts