Current status of the Fly's Eye Camera System
Mészáros László
MTA CSFK CSI


This project aims to provide a low resolution and multiple-passband full-sky survey with an imaging cadence of a few minutes. Based on our earlier tests, we found that a novel type of astronomical telescope mount on a hexapod platform can provide the accuracy of sidereal tracking needed by our instrumentation. The fully configured Fly's Eye device contains 19 wide-field cameras equipped with fast focal ratio optics which are arranged in a mosaic form and have an effective resolution of 20 arcseconds per pixel. The scientific goal of this project is to continuously monitor stellar brightness variations in the full Sloan photometric system down to the magnitude of r=15 or the limit of apparent stellar confusion. The data acquisition will then cover roughly 6 magnitudes of the time domain, from the scales of minutes up to the several years of planned operations. Fly's Eye data yield is complementary to that of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope since the saturation magnitude of LSST is close to the faint limit of the Fly's Eye setup.