APOW
Assassin Picture of the Week

2013 July 24

"Assassin" Unit 1: Brutus

Our team makes ASAS-SN a success, but we also need excellent hardware to aid us in our ultimate goal of studying real-time variability of the entire sky. To achieve large field of view with a very stable and uniform point-spread-function (PSF) across the field, we use Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 400mm f/2.8G ED VR AF lenses. We had high expectations for these lenses and were not disappointed: we obtain very stable and sharp images for many nights in a row. This is crucial for the image subtraction method, which we employ to detect transients, to work best. Since we are using relatively small telescopes (lenses), we cannnot afford to waste many photons. As our detectors we have selected ProLine PL230 CCD cameras from FLI, with back-iluminated E2V sensors, giving us high QE, low-noise and fast readout (and of course they are electrically cooled). To cover several thousand square degrees each night, we take many hundreds of images nightly, and we have been very happy with the reliability of our cameras.

For more pictures of "Brutus", see this link.


See the previous APOW.
This homepage is maintained by Ben Shappee and Kris Stanek. Updated Wed Jul 24 14:28:46 EDT 2013

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