http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.03162Astrobites: Evryscope, Greek for “wide-seeing”
BY GUDMUNDUR STEFANSSON ⋅ JANUARY 26, 2015 ⋅
Title: Evryscope Science: Exploring the Potential of All-Sky Gigapixel-Scale Telescopes
Authors: Nicholas M. Law et al.
First Author’s Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
How fantastic would it be to image the entire sky, every few minutes, every night, for a series of years? The science cases for such surveys —in today’s paper they are called All-Sky Gigapixel Scale Surveys— are numerous, and span a huge range of astronomical topics. Just to begin with, such surveys could: detect transiting giant planets, sample Gamma Ray Bursts and nearby Supernovae, and a wealth of other rare and/or unexpected transient events that are further described in the paper.
Evryscope is a telescope that sets out to take such a minute-by-minute movie of the sky accessible to it. It is designed as an array of extremely wide-angle telescopes, contrasting the traditional meaning of the word “tele-scope” (Greek for “far-seeing”) by Evryscope’s emphasis on extremely wide angles (“Evryscope” is Greek for “wide-seeing”). The array is currently being constructed by the authors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is scheduled to be deployed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile later this year. ...
The currently under-construction Evryscope, showing the 1.8m diameter custom-molded dome. The dome houses 27 individual 61mm aperture telescopes, each of which have their own CCD detector. Figure 1 from the paper.
http://evryscope.astro.unc.edu/
Margarita