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The Fly's Eye camera system

An introduction to our project

The “Fly's Eye” camera system is a proposed high resolution all-sky monitoring device intended to perform high cadence time domain astronomy in multiple optical passbands while still accomplish a high étendue. In July 2012, supported by the “Momentum” Initiative, fundings has been accepted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in order to design and build a “Fly's Eye” device unit. Beyond the technical details and the actual scientific goals, here we also demonstrate the possibilities and yields of a possible network operation involving approximately a dozen of sites distributed geographically in a nearly homogeneous manner. As of April 2014, we finalized the design and manufacturing of the hexapod mount assembly – that performs the sidereal tracking during the exposures – and we now have a full working prototype with a single camera. The prototype has been operating smoothly since the late summer of 2013. This long period of testing have shown what kind of tweakings and tunings are needed for the hexapod itself and we also gathered numerous valuable scientific data. Currently, we expect to increase the number of number of individual cameras up to 6 - 8 during the summer of 2014.

In this project, we intend to follow an “open design, open source and open data” model. In other words, both the mechanical or electronic schematics and the data acquisition control and data processing program codes will be publicly available as well as the pre-processed imaging, calibration and photometric data would also go into the public domain after a relatively short period of time. In addition, the design would be more feasible for operation in harsh environment, due to the involvement of an enclosure with optical windows and regulated temperature and humidity inside the enclosure. The robust mechanical design that exploits a hexapod for local sidereal tracking will lack unique moving parts and be fault tolerant due to its redundancy. Moreover, exactly the same instrument can be built independently from the actual geographical location and the installation procedure is simple since there is no need for polar alignment.

Learn more...

Some more detailed resources and presentations about our project:

News

For recent events and image galleries check the news section. Highlight (2017 April): complete, system up and running! (drone photo of the instrument, scaled down mosaic)

Publications

The members of group are involved in numerous additional projcects as well. Please see this list about our publication activities that have been supported by our project.

Contact us

We try to keep this site up-to-date as frequently as it is possible. Please contact us for if interested in further details. Our contact addresses can be found here.