A new kind of telescope that can photograph the whole sky simultaneously | Hacker News Reader

A new kind of telescope that can photograph the whole sky simultaneously

technologyreview.com

32 pointsnkurz11 comments

It is, however, not clear to me what kind of useful information we can get from the visible spectrum at this low magnification. At 85mm you can't even make out features on the moon.

In the linked paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0026v1.pdf) they suggest that it will be useful for "extremely-wide-field transiting exoplanet searches, realtime searches for transient and variable phenomena, and ... the capability to effectively pre-image unexpected events detected by other surveys". Based on the relative length of the descriptions, they seem most interested in the exoplanet surveys.

This is right. The other science topics mentioned have longer timescales (hours or days), so surveys with smaller fields of view but bigger light collecting power are better at finding these events.

For exoplanet transits, though, you're interested in frequent time sampling to catch and model the passage of the planet in front of the star, so sampling all the bright stars in the sky every few minutes is a great way to do this. It also explains the high Arctic observing site (lots of stars that never set and can be observed for months at a time).

Thanks for the explanations, guys!

"Magnification" isn't quite the word you want. The small telescopes are quite capable of measuring the changing brightness of bright variable stars, moving objects (asteroids and comets), and supernovae and other explosions.

Here's a movie taken with a lens of this size at a site in the high Arctic (hence the circumpolar rotation): http://user.physics.unc.edu/~nmlaw/arctic_cameras/arctic_cam...

This thing can photograph the whole sky in a few days in much better quality:

> VISTA is a 4-m class wide field survey telescope for the southern hemisphere, equipped with a near infrared camera (1.65 degree diameter field of view

http://www.vista.ac.uk/

My first reaction when I saw the graphic was why does it needs an equatorial mount + tracking hardware if it is whole sky?

Because it would allow only very short exposures otherwise.

I would have thought software image processing could handle this.

Should've called it clesthora's eye

Clesthyra that is. http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Clesthyra%27s_Eye

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