The Digital Telescope is a concept designed to enable high cadence photometric monitoring of a large area of the sky (potential the whole visible sky) for objects as faint as 21st magnitude, potentially fainter. Objects brighter than about 15th mag should be observable with sub-second time resolution. The faintest objects will require a few hundred seconds of stacked images.
The instrument itself is a compact array of commercially available telescopes with CMOS detectors. The telescopes are stationary and the detectors are run at a cadence <<1sec, minimising trailing. As the data rate is high it is analysed in a real time pipeline.
In this design astronomical objects move with sidereal motion while solar system or satellites move on different vectors. Correcting for sidereal motion is straightforward while searching non-sidereal vectors needs more sophisticated algorithms.
The ERC have supported the construction of a prototype instrument composed of 52 telescopes and with an instantaneous field of 130×7 deg. Negotiations are underway to locate the instrument on La Palma and we expect the first data to be available within 2 years. Typical projects will be the “instantaneous” detection of explosive events (and maybe triggering other observations), photometry of populations of objects etc.
We intend to hold a community meeting at the RAS on 25th September from 11am to gauge community interest. We will show in greater detail how the instrument works and some of the science that will be possible. Our aim for this meeting is to start exploring the diversity of science cases that are of interest to the community. We would like to explore the requirements they would place on pipeline. We would also like to explore the interest in a deeper system. While we have a baseline system we may be able to explore larger optics.
If you are interested in attending this meeting (or even if you cannot make the meeting but would like to stay in touch with project progress), then please register by mailing Don Pollacco (d.pollacco@warwick.ac.uk). This list would also be used to setup an information email distribution list.
Further details of the Digital Telescope concept are available on
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/astro/research/digit/
Meeting agenda will be sent to those registering a few days before the meeting.