Panoramic SETI: on-sky results from prototype telescopes and instrumental design

TL;DR

PANOSETI is a wide-field optical SETI experiment using multiple telescopes with fast photon-counting hardware to detect transient signals, demonstrating reduced false alarms with separated telescope pairs in preliminary on-sky tests.

Contribution

This work introduces the PANOSETI prototype system and provides initial on-sky performance data, highlighting the benefits of telescope separation for false alarm reduction.

Findings

Separated telescopes (>1 km) reduce false positives.

Prototype telescopes achieve large field-of-view detection.

Preliminary results validate instrument performance.

Abstract

The Panoramic SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiment (PANOSETI) aims to detect and quantify optical transients from nanosecond to second precision over a large field-of-view ($\sim$4,450 square-degrees). To meet these challenging timing and wide-field requirements, the PANOSETI experiment will use two assemblies of $\sim$45 telescopes to reject spurious signals by coincidence detection, each one comprising custom-made fast photon-counting hardware combined with ($f/1.32$) focusing optics. Preliminary on-sky results from pairs of PANOSETI prototype telescopes (100 sq.deg.) are presented in terms of instrument performance and false alarm rates. We found that a separation of $>$1 km between telescopes surveying the same field-of-view significantly reduces the number of false positives due to nearby sources (e.g., Cherenkov showers) in comparison to a side-by-side configuration of telescopes. Design considerations on the all-sky PANOSETI instrument and expected field-of-views are reported.