Panopticon*: a telescope for our times

Will Saunders, Timothy Chin, Michael Goodwin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

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 3° FoV with ~25,000 targets; (b) multi-object AO with 12m aperture over 3° FoV with ~100 AO-corrected Integral Field Units each with 4” FoV; (c) ground layer AO-corrected integral field spectroscopy with 15m aperture and 13' 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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGround-based and Airborne Telescopes X
EditorsHeather K. Marshall, Jason Spyromilio, Tomonori Usuda
Place of PublicationBellingham, Washington
PublisherSPIE
Pages130943A-1-130943A-10
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781510675124
ISBN (Print)9781510675117
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
EventGround-Based and Airborne Telescopes X 2024 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: 16 Jun 202421 Jun 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of SPIE
Volume13094
ISSN (Print)0277-786X
ISSN (Electronic)1996-756X

Conference

ConferenceGround-Based and Airborne Telescopes X 2024
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period16/06/2421/06/24

Keywords

  • adaptive optics
  • ground-layer adaptive optics
  • integral field spectroscopy
  • integral field unit
  • multi-object adaptive optics
  • multi-object spectroscopy
  • wide-field spectroscopy
  • Wide-field telescope

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