 | 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
