The VOEvent standard provides a means of describing transient celestial events in a machine-readable format. This is an essential step towards analysing and, where appropriate, responding to the large volumes of transients which will be detected by f
uture large scale surveys. The VOEvent Transport Protocol (VTP) defines a system by which VOEvents may be disseminated to the community. We describe the design and implementation of Comet, a freely available, open source implementation of VTP. We use Comet as a base to explore the performance characteristics of the VTP system, in particular with reference to meeting the requirements of future survey projects. We describe how, with the aid of simple extensions to VTP, Comet can help users filter high-volume streams of VOEvents to extract only those which are of relevance to particular science cases. Based on these tests and on the experience of developing Comet, we derive a number of recommendations for future refinements of the VTP standard.
We have used the Taurus Tunable Filter to search for Lyman alpha emitters in the fields of three high redshift quasar fields: two at z~2.2 (MRC B1256-243 and MRC B2158-206) and one at z~4.5 (BR B0019-1522). Our observations had a field of view of aro
und 35 square arcminutes, and reached AB magnitudes of magnitudes of ~21 (MRC B1256-243), ~22 (MRC B2158-206), and ~22.6 (BR B0019-1522), dependent on wavelength. We have identified candidate emission line galaxies in all three of the fields, with the higher redshift field being by far the richest. By combining our observations with simulations of the instrumental response, we estimate the total density of emission line galaxies in each field. Seventeen candidate emission line galaxies were found in within 1.5 Mpc of BR0019-1522, a number density of 4.9 +/- 1.2 x 10^-3 Mpc^-3, suggesting a significant galaxy overdensity at z~4.5.
