Panopticon: a telescope for our times

Will Saunders; Timothy Chin; Michael Goodwin

doi:10.1117/12.3023792

11 September 2024 Panopticon: a telescope for our times

Will Saunders, Timothy Chin, Michael Goodwin

Proceedings Volume 13094, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes X; 130943A (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3023792
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2024, Yokohama, Japan

Conference Poster

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.

(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Will Saunders, Timothy Chin, and Michael Goodwin "Panopticon: a telescope for our times", Proc. SPIE 13094, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes X, 130943A (11 September 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3023792

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