Our telescopes are hosted by LCOGT. ASAS-SN is supported in part by CCAPP.

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NEWS: We are taking data with four telescopes in Hawaii, and we now started real time reduction (Dec. 2013).

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ASAS (Warsaw) | ASAS-SN Transients | APOW: Picture of the Week | Our Channel

The sky is big: even in the present day, only human eyes fully survey the sky for the transient, variable and violent events that are crucial probes of the nature and physics of our Universe. We plan to change that with our "All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae" (ASAS-SN or "Assassin") project, which will (eventually) automatically survey the entire visible sky every night down to about 17th magnitude, more than 10,000 times deeper than human eye. Such a project is guaranteed to result in many important discoveries, some of them potentially transformative to the field of astrophysics.

At this point we have two four robotic 14-cm telescopes deployed at Haleakala station of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, each with a 4.5x4.5 degrees field of view, allowing us to observe approximately 5,000 10,000 square degrees each clear night. These four telescopes form Unit-1 of ASAS-SN, known as "Brutus", which also happens to be the name of the Ohio State mascot. ASAS-SN Unit-2, named "Cassius", will be deployed in the Southern Hemisphere in early 2014, initially with two telescopes, allowing us to improve our cadence and sky coverage. Eventually (donations welcome!), we would like to deploy 10 more telescopes and cameras at four different sites, allowing us to automatically survey the entire visible sky every night.

We started real-time reduction and analysis of "Brutus" four-telescope data in December 2013 and we are already making discoveries:

At OSU: Ben Shappee, Chris Kochanek, Kris Stanek, Tom Holoien, Jacob Jencson, Udit Basu (high school student), John Beacom;

José Luis Prieto (Princeton);

At Warsaw University Observatory: Grzegorz Pojmanski, Dorota Szczygiel;

At LCOGT: M. Dubberley, M. Elphick, S. Foale, E. Hawkins, D. Mullens, W. Rosing, R. Ross, Z. Walker;

Joseph Brimacombe (Coral Towers Observatory);

David Bersier (LJMU).

A crucial part of our project is the follow-up effort with bigger telescopes to get confirmation imaging (Brutus has 7.5" pixels) and spectroscopy. Sometimes a space-based telescope is needed: outburst of the AGN in NGC 2617 has been monitored by Swift. A number of people have kindly contributed their own telescope time to help us in our effort, which we most appreciate! Here are the names of our collaborators on ASAS-SN results annouced so far: S. Adams (Ohio State), A. Campillay (Las Campanas Observatory), C. Choi (Seoul National University), C. Contreras (Las Campanas Observatory), C. Copperwheat (LJMU), G. De Rosa (Ohio State), M. Dietrich (Ohio University), M. Fausnaugh (Ohio State), D. Grupe (Penn State), D. Gifford (University of Michigan), M. Giustini (XMM-Newton Science Operation Centre), C. Gonzalez (Las Campanas Observatory), A. Goulding (CfA), K. Hainline (Dartmouth), R. Hickox (Dartmouth), R. Hounsell (STScI), D. Howell (LCOGT), E. Hsiao (Las Campanas Observatory), M. Im (Seoul National University), S. Komossa (Max-Planck Institut fur Radioastronomie), M. Koss (IfA), P. Lira (U. Chile), K. Leighly (University of Oklahoma), S. Mathur (Ohio Sate), N. Morrell (LCO), A. Mosquera (Ohio State), D. Mudd (Ohio State), J. Nugent (University of Oklahoma), B. Peterson (Ohio State), M. Phillips (Carnegie Observatories), R. Pogge (Ohio State), J. Rich (Carnegie Observatories), D. Sand (Texas Tech University), S. Schmidt (Ohio State), A. Sheffield (Columbia), S. Starrfield (ASU), M. Wagner (LBTO), E. Woodward (U. Minnesota), S. Valenti (LCOGT), S. Villanueva (Ohio State), Y. Yoon (Seoul National University), Y. Zu (Pittsburgh).

So when you get an e-mail or a phone-call from us, asking to collaborate on a new exciting ASAS-SN target, we hope you will say "yes"!

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.