Christoffer Fremling (Caltech) -- The Zwicky Transient Facility Bright Transient Survey

We present the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Bright Transient Survey (BTS). The BTS is a public survey with two components: (1) We publicly report all bright (<19 mag) supernova (SN) candidates found by the ZTF Northern Sky Survey to the Transient Name Server (TNS). (2) An IFU (SEDM) mounted on the Palomar 60 inch (P60) telescope is used to obtain classification spectra of these SN candidates. All P60/SEDM classifications are reported to TNS. Our current spectroscopic completeness for <18.5 mag SNe is >93%. The primary motivation for the BTS is to use SNe to measure the fraction of galaxies in the local universe (<200 Mpc) that have cataloged redshifts, or the redshift completeness factor (RCF). Previous estimates of the RCF show that < 75 % of z < 0.03 galaxies are cataloged. In this talk we present a measurement of the RCF up to z=0.2. In addition to measuring galaxy completeness, the data collected by the BTS survey will also allow future studies of a wide range of topics within supernova astrophysics, such as SN rates, demographics and SN host galaxy association.