http://fornaxmounts.com/science.html
The HAT-PI Project is building a telescope that will, in a single exposure, observe the majority of the night sky visible from its observing site in Chile in 30 seconds. This is accomplished by attaching up to 63 carefully aligned lens-and-camera sub-units to a large mount. The mount will track stars as they rise and set during the night while the telescope keeps imaging, effectively creating a movie of the night-sky. HAT-PI will enable the detection of a diverse array of objects ranging from near-earth asteroids and exoplanets around bright stars to novae and bright gamma-ray bursts. The large field of view of this instrument, coupled with the dense time-sampling, will vastly improve our understanding of transient astronomical events.
https://web.astro.princeton.edu/news/ga … pi-project
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Principal Investigator Gaspar Bakos has been awarded $1M through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for a project at Princeton dubbed HATPI – “HAT” from the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope and “PI” for the sky coverage of the telescope (π steradians) of the night sky – about the angle covered by an umbrella held over your head.
While most telescopes make very specific observations, repeated with a timescales of a few days to years, HATPI has a 30-second cadence through a hedgehog-like array of 63 telescopes on a single mount. HATPI will create very high precision measurements to detect the shadow of a planet crossing the (unseen) disk of nearby stars. It is also great for finding earth-threatening asteroids, all kinds of variable stars, exploding stars and possibly even the optical emission from a gravitational wave source. The telescope will be sited at Las Campanas Observatory in northern Chile. It will cover the whole sky every clear night and over the course of a year, it will record three-quarters of the entire sky. The Princeton team also aims to process the data in real time and make the results public.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.00849.pdf
In parallel to TESS, we anticipate that a new ground-based survey, called HATPI, will come online. HATPI will ultimately use an array of 63 lenses and CCDs to image the entire sky above 30 degrees (1 π steradian) on a mosaic, every 30 seconds, whenever conditions permit, yielding better than 3 mmag photometric precision at 30 s cadence for stars at r ≈ 10. Construction of HATPI at Las Campanas Observatory
is under way. The massive, high-precision data from HATPI will complement TESS, and will also offer remarkable synergies with the Gaia space mission.