Searching for Optical Transients in Real-Time: The RAPTOR Experiment

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Gamma-Ray Sources, Gamma-Ray Bursts, Ground-Based Ultraviolet, Optical And Infrared Telescopes

Scientific paper

A rich, but relatively unexplored, region in optical astronomy is the study of transients with durations of less than a day. We describe a wide-field optical monitoring system, RAPTOR, which is designed to identify and make follow-up observations of optical transients in real-time. The system is composed of an array of telescopes that continuously monitor about 1500 square degrees of the sky for transients down to about 12th magnitude in 60 seconds and a central fovea telescope that can reach 16th magnitude in 60 seconds. Coupled to the telescope array is a real-time data analysis pipeline that is designed to identify transients on timescales of seconds. In a manner analogous to human vision, the entire array is mounted on a rapidly slewing robotic mount so that the fovea of the array can be rapidly directed at transients identified by the wide-field system. The goal of the project is to develop a ground-based optical system that can reliably identify transients in real-time and ultimately generate alerts with source locations to enable follow-up observations with other, larger, telescopes.

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