PanSTARRS Follow-up Of K2 Campaign 16 anf 17 Supernova Fields ("K2SNE")

Since 2014, NASA's K2 mission has used the Kepler space telescope to perform high-precision photometry of tens of thousands of stars and galaxies along the ecliptic in "Campaigns" lasting between 65 and 80 days. Most Campaigns were executed in the "backward facing" direction, where the spacecraft was pointed roughly away from Earth. The advantage of this orientation, given Kepler's Earth-trailing orbit, is that Earth never crosses the field of view during a Campaign. However, in this orientation, the Campaign's field of view is only visible from the ground during twilight. K2's 16th and 17th Campaigns were in the "forward facing" orientation to facilitate contemporaneous observations from Earth-based facilities over the entire duration of the campaigns. Numerous investigations executed during C16 and C17 were designed to specifically take advantage of the ability to simultaneously obtain complementary observations of K2 targets. PanSTARRS1 ("PS1") monitored these fields during the K2 campaigns in multiple filters. The primary motivation was to identify supernovae in the K2 fields rapidly enough to enable follow-up observations. Transients were identified by the PanSTARRS Transient Science Server within 12-24 hours of observations. Alerts were released via the Transient Name Server. The PS1 K2 supernova survey data are released here as a MAST HLSP. Please refer to the AAS Research Note (Dotson et al. 2018) for more information and relevant references to the PanSTARRS data, observations, processing, and survey strategies.