The Fermi Large Area Telescope Flare Advocate Program: Rapid Sharing of Results with the Community

The Fermi Flare Advocate (also known as Gamma-ray Sky Watcher) program provides a quick look and review of the gamma-ray sky observed daily by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) through on-duty LAT Flare Advocates and high-level software pipelines like the LAT Automatic Science Processing and the Fermi All-sky Variability Analysis. The FA-GSW service provides rapid alerts and communicates to the external scientific community potentially new gamma-ray sources, interesting transients and flares. News items are regularly posted through the Fermi multiwavelength mailing list, Astronomer's Telegrams and Gamma-ray Coordinates Network notices. A weekly digest containing the highlights about the variable LAT gamma-ray sky at E>100 MeV is published on the web ("Fermi Sky Blog"). From July 2008 to September 2014 more than 290 ATels and 90 GCNs have been published by the Fermi LAT Collaboration. Target of opportunity observing programs with other satellites and telescopes have been triggered by Flare Advocates based on gamma-ray flares from blazars and other kinds of sources.