ASAS-SN is currently shut down as our survey doubles in size.  In the foreground of the left image above, you can see how Brutus has been for the past year, with two cameras on a common mount.  On the right, you can see that Brutus now has twice as many cameras.  These additions will allows us to survey more of the sky at a faster cadence.  Brutus will now help us to find more SNe and to find them earlier!  The new system is expected to be back on sky for the first time tonight, and we hope to be back discovering some of the most interesting transients objects in the sky within a week. 

Brutus is hosted by the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) in the "clam shell" enclosure of the Faulkes Telescope North 2m (background of the left picture) at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. 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. 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 >10,000 thousand square degrees each night, we take many hundreds of images nightly, and we have been very happy with the reliability of our cameras. 

A special thanks to Mark Elphick and David Mullins for working hard to make this transition quickly!