The Fly's Eye Camera System -- an instrument design for large \'etendue time-domain survey

TL;DR

The paper presents the design and potential scientific impact of the Fly's Eye Camera System, a high-resolution, all-sky, high-cadence survey instrument for time-domain astronomy, including plans for a geographically distributed network.

Contribution

It introduces a novel high-étendue, multi-band camera system for large-scale time-domain sky monitoring and discusses the development and deployment plans for a global network.

Findings

Design concept and technical specifications outlined.

Funding secured for prototype development.

Expected deployment and operational timeline provided.

Abstract

In this paper we briefly summarize the design concepts of the Fly's Eye Camera System, a proposed high resolution all-sky monitoring device which intends to perform high cadence time domain astronomy in multiple optical passbands while still accomplish a high \'etendue. Fundings have already been accepted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in order to design and build a Fly's Eye device unit. Beyond the technical details and the actual scientific goals, this paper also discusses the possibilities and yields of a network operation involving ~10 sites distributed geographically in a nearly homogeneous manner. Currently, we expect to finalize the mount assembly -- that performs the sidereal tracking during the exposures -- until the end of 2012 and to have a working prototype with a reduced number of individual cameras sometimes in the spring or summer of 2013.