Making the GCN More Useful with GreaseMonkey

For people who do research on gamma-ray bursts, one of the central clearing houses is the GCN. This service provides hot new results about the most recent GRBs. Unfortunately the presentation is a little spartan: most of the pages are plain text and there is no cross-linking between circulars and to GRBs. Here is an example circular:

Mozilla Firefox TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 5818 SUBJECT: GRB061110A: Correction to GCN5817 DATE: 06/11/12 19:45:13 GMT FROM: Johan U. Fynbo at U.Copenhagen <jf Johan P. U. Fynbo (DARK) report: Unfortunately I made an error in the gain-co reported in GCN #5817. Here are the correct photometry. In the NOT images taken about 8

As you can see, it's just plain text. Because of that, the page title is "Mozilla Firefox" and there are no hot links on the page.

I've created some GreaseMonkey scripts which tweak the contents of GCN notice and circular pages. The first one, GCN GRB Linker, adds links to each GCN circular and notice for every reference to a GCN or GRB that it can find. It correctly handles multiple GRBs on one day (i.e. it points to the single repository on the GCN for all bursts from that day). Let's see
how that looks:

Title: GCN #5818: GRB061110A: Correction to... TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 5818 SUBJECT: GRB061110A: Correction to GCN5817 DATE: 06/11/12 19:45:13 GMT FROM: Johan U. Fynbo at U.Copenhagen <jf Johan P. U. Fynbo (DARK) report: Unfortunately I made an error in the gain-co reported in GCN #5817. Here are the correct photometry. In the NOT images taken about 8

Much better. Now there are links to take you to useful places like the web was intended to do.

The second script is called GCN Coordinate Query, and it inserts a set of queries to three common astronomical databases wherever a set of GCN GRB coordinates appears. This makes it easy to do simple searches around GRB positions without doing complicated gymnastics with the mouse.

See below for the script download information.

Prerequisites:

• Intense interest in gamma-ray bursts
• Use the Mozilla Firefox browser
• Have GreaseMonkey installed

Downloads:

• GCN GRB Linker
• GCN Coordinate Query