Panopticon: a telescope for our times

TL;DR

The paper proposes a novel wide-field spectroscopic telescope design with spherical mirrors and multiple observing modes, offering exceptional image quality and survey speed at a relatively modest cost, suitable for large-area survey follow-up.

Contribution

It introduces a new telescope design that corrects spherical aberration for each target, enabling high-quality, wide-field spectroscopy with multiple modes in a cost-effective manner.

Findings

Achieves exceptional image quality with spherical mirrors corrected per target.

Offers three simultaneous observing modes with high survey speed.

Cost estimated at around $500 million, making it accessible for large surveys.

Abstract

We present a design for a wide-field spectroscopic telescope. The only large powered mirror is spherical, the resulting spherical aberration is corrected for each target separately, giving exceptional image quality. The telescope is a transit design, but still allows all-sky coverage. Three simultaneous modes are proposed: (a) natural seeing multi-object spectroscopy with 12m aperture over 3dg FoV with ~25,000 targets; (b) multi-object AO with 12m aperture over 3dg FoV with ~100 AO-corrected Integral Field Units each with 4 arcsec FoV; (c) ground layer AO-corrected integral field spectroscopy with 15m aperture and 13 arcmin FoV. Such a telescope would be uniquely powerful for large-area follow-up of imaging surveys; in each mode, the AOmega and survey speed exceed all existing facilities combined. The expected cost of this design is relatively modest, much closer to $500M than $1000M.