Mini-tracker concepts for the SALT transient follow-up program

John A. Booth; Michael Shara; Steven M. Crawford; Lisa A. Crause

doi:10.1117/12.2311909

10 July 2018 Mini-tracker concepts for the SALT transient follow-up program

John A. Booth, Michael Shara, Steven M. Crawford, Lisa A. Crause

Proceedings Volume 10700, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VII; 107000S (2018) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2311909
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2018, Austin, Texas, United States

Abstract

The MeerKAT radio telescope array, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and eventually the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will usher in a remarkable new era in astronomy, with thousands of transients being discovered and transmitted to the astronomical community in near-real-time each night. Immediate spectroscopic follow-up will be critical to understanding their early-time physics – a task to which the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is uniquely suited, given its southerly latitude and the 14-degree-diameter uncorrected field (patrol area) of its 10-m spherical primary mirror. A new telescope configuration is envisioned, incorporating multiple “mini-trackers” that range around a much larger patrol area of 35 degrees in diameter. Each mini-tracker is equipped with a small spherical aberration corrector feeding an efficient, low resolution spectrograph to perform contemporaneous follow-up observations.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

John A. Booth, Michael Shara, Steven M. Crawford, and Lisa A. Crause "Mini-tracker concepts for the SALT transient follow-up program", Proc. SPIE 10700, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VII, 107000S (10 July 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2311909

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