A new generation of wide-field photometric surveys offer us the opportunity to discover microlensing events across the entire sky. This unlocks the possibility to deliver new constraints on the mass functions of intrinsically faint objects in a range of different stellar environments across the Milky Way. Indeed, since the technique does not depend on light from the lens, microlensing is currently our best tool to detect the population of cold-planets, brown dwarfs and isolated stellar remnants at large distances from the Earth. However, the cadences of many wide-area surveys are insufficient to verify the lensing nature of the events and to accurately derive the physical properties of the lens system. The OMEGA Project conducts photometric and spectroscopic follow-up of microlensing candidates detected in wide-area surveys. The unique capabilities of the Las Cumbres Observatory network to observe continuously with complementary apertures and instruments will ensure unique constraints on the lenses properties, especially their masses and distances.This project will start a systematic mapping of the faintest object in the entire Milky Way.
Observations for the OMEGA project are conducted autonomously by our TOM system, the Microlensing Observing Platform, MOP, which was built using LCO's open-source TOM Toolkit. MOP automatically harvests discovery alerts from Gaia, ZTF, OGLE and MOA, and selects the highest priority targets using the TAP algorithm developed by our team. The system automatically determines what observations are most valuable to characterize ongoing microlensing events, and programmatically requests those observations from the LCO network.
The resulting data products are harvested automatically from the LCO Archive, and reduced with the open source Difference Image Analysis pipeline pyDANDIA. This pipeline includes a TOM interface, allowing the resulting lightcurves to be uploaded to MOP as soon as they are available, where they are automatically modeled using the open-source pyLIMA microlensing modeling package developed by E. Bachelet. The results of this analysis are used to determine the priorities of future observations in a continuous cycle that ensures a rapid response to new discoveries and planetary anomalies.