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.
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