The INTEGRAL Galactic bulge monitoring program

The central part of our own Galaxy, i.e., the Galactic bulge region, is a rich host of stars showing variable highly energetic radiation. These sources include binaries containing a black hole or a neutron star, some of which only appear for a certain amount of time (called transients). We have a program to monitor the Galactic bulge region regularly and frequently (once every revolution around the earth, i.e., once about every 3 days) with ESA's gamma-ray observatory INTEGRAL. As a service to the scientific community the high-energy images and light curves of various sources in the field of view are made available through the WWW at http://isdc.unige.ch/Science/BULGE. This video shows the compilation of images (one revolution every 1/6th of a second) of this exciting program which started in February 2005. We zoom here on the region around the center of our Galaxy, and use information in the hard X-ray band, 18-40 keV. The transient stars, or so-called "guest" stars are annotated in red. The more persistently seen stars are annotated in white.