The Argus Array: low-cost access to the deep, high-cadence sky

Nicholas Law; Hank Corbett; Alan Vasquez Soto; Ramses Gonzalez; Lawrence Machia; Jonathan Carney; William Marshall; Glenn Walters; Shannon Fitton; Amy Glazier; Thomas Procter

doi:10.1117/12.3019797

28 August 2024 The Argus Array: low-cost access to the deep, high-cadence sky

Nicholas Law, Hank Corbett, Alan Vasquez Soto, Ramses Gonzalez, Lawrence Machia, Jonathan Carney, William Marshall, Glenn Walters, Shannon Fitton, Amy Glazier, Thomas Procter

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 13094, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes X; 130941W (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3019797
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2024, Yokohama, Japan

Abstract

The Argus Array will be the first large optical telescope capable of exploring the entire sky simultaneously. Consisting of 900 small-aperture telescopes with ultra-low-noise detectors multiplexed into a 55 GPix array, Argus will have the equivalent collecting area of a 5m telescope but will explore the sky in a very different way from conventional survey telescopes. Each Argus exposure covers 8,000 square degrees with a sampling of 1.4"/pixel; this enormous field of view allows the Array to achieve deep imaging by observing every part of the sky at cadences as fast as one second – for 6-10 hours each night. Realtime transient detection systems will process the incoming images at TB/sec speeds on a high-speed GPU cluster. Over five years, the Array will build a publicly-available, two-color, million-epoch movie of the northern sky, giving the astronomical community the unprecedented ability to follow the evolution of every deep time-variable source across the sky simultaneously. We will detail the current status of the Argus project, including construction plans and first results from the on-sky Argus Pathfinder hardware and software prototype system.

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Nicholas Law, Hank Corbett, Alan Vasquez Soto, Ramses Gonzalez, Lawrence Machia, Jonathan Carney, William Marshall, Glenn Walters, Shannon Fitton, Amy Glazier, and Thomas Procter "The Argus Array: low-cost access to the deep, high-cadence sky", Proc. SPIE 13094, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes X, 130941W (28 August 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3019797

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