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Bright supernovae discovered: 428 (151 in 2016)

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ASAS-SN: All Transients | Supernovae | CV Patrol | ATels | Papers

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Follow @SuperASASSN Twitter | Channel | Picture of the Week | ASAS (Warsaw)

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Status live: |

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We are now supported by 5-year grant GBMF5490.

We are also supported by Grant AST-151592. Our telescopes are hosted by .

ASAS-SN expansion was possible with suport from , , and CASSACA.

We thank George Skestos for his generous gift to Prof. Kochanek, partially used to expand ASAS-SN.

We thank Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund for supporting our operations.

ASAS-SN is currently comprised of two units. ASAS-SN Unit-1, known as "Brutus", which also happens to be the name of the Ohio State mascot, is comprised of four robotic 14-cm telescopes deployed at the Haleakala station of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network. ASAS-SN Unit-2, named "Cassius", also consists of four 14-cm telescopes deployed at the LCOGT Cerro Tololo station. Together, these allow us to observe a total of approximately 20,000 square degrees each clear night. With support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant GBMF5490 we will soon deploy additional 8 telescopes at two other LCO sites, allowing us to survey the entire visible sky every night, and making our network much less sensitive to weather conditions.

At OSU: Jon Brown, Tom Holoien, Chris Kochanek, Josh Shields, Kris Stanek, John Beacom, Todd Thompson;

Ben Shappee has moved (August 2014) to Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, to start his 5-year Hubble-Carnegie-Princeton Postdoctoral Fellowship;

José Luis Prieto (Universidad Diego Portales; MAS);

Grzegorz Pojmanski (Warsaw University Observatory);

Joseph Brimacombe (Coral Towers Observatory);

David Bersier (LJMU);

Subo Dong, Ping Chen, Subhash Bose (KIAA-PKU);

Emilio Falco (CfA);

Przemek Wozniak (LANL);

Maximilian Stritzinger (Aarhus);

Nidia Morrell (Carnegie Observatories, Las Campanas Observatory);

Laura Chomiuk, Jay Strader (MSU);

Raffaella Margutti (Northwestern);

Anna Franckowiak (DESY).

Udit Basu, a local (Ohio) high school student who worked with us for 3 years, is now an undergrad at Princeton Astrophysics.

We thank Las Cumbres Observatory and its staff for their continued support of ASAS-SN: we truly could not do this without your help.

An important part of our project is the follow-up effort with bigger telescopes to get confirmation imaging (our images have 7.8" pixels). We are fortunate to have a number of "unpaid professional astronomers" working with us on ASAS-SN "ad hoc" SN confirmation effort: E. Conseil (Association Francaise des Observateurs d'Etoiles Variables, France), I. Cruz (Cruz Observatory, USA), J. M. Fernandez (Observatory Inmaculada del Molino, Spain), S. Kiyota (Variable Star Observers League in Japan), R. A. Koff (AntelopeHills Observatory), G. Krannich (Roof Observatory Kaufering, Germany), G. Masi (Virtual Telescope Project, Ceccano, Italy), L. A. G. Monard (Klein Karoo Observatory, Western Cape, South Africa), B. Nicholls (Mt. Vernon Obs., New Zealand), J. Nicolas (Groupe SNAUDE, France), R. Post (Post Astronomy), G. Stone (Sierra Remote Observatories), W. Wiethoff (University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA). You can see from many joint Astronomer's Telegrams we have published that it is a very fruitful collaboration - we have confirmed together almost 300 supernovae!

A number of professional astronomers have also contributed their effort and telescope time to ASAS-SN, which we most appreciate. You can see the names of our collaborators on ASAS-SN results annouced so far on ASAS-SN papers and ATels. So when you get an e-mail 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:

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 CCD sensors, giving us high QE, low-noise and fast readout (and of course they are electrically cooled). To cover 20,000 square degrees each night, we take several hundreds of images nightly with each camera. We have been very happy with the reliability of our cameras, and we will be deploying more of them as part of our 2017 expansion.

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 stable and sharp images for many nights in a row. Stability is crucial for the image subtraction method, which we employ to detect transients, to work best.

And again, all ASAS-SN telescopes are deployed and run by Las Cumbres Observatory, including their telescope hardware and software: "Many eyes - one vision".