Construction of a medium-sized Schwarzschild-Couder telescope as a candidate for the Cherenkov Telescope Array: development of the optical alignment system
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics2019-08-14v1High Energy Astrophysical PhenomenaOptics
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an international project for a next-generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory. CTA, conceived as an array of tens of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, comprising small, medium and large-size telescopes, is aiming to improve on the sensitivity of current-generation experiments by an order of magnitude and provide energy coverage from 20 GeV to more than 300 TeV. The Schwarzschild-Couder (SC) medium-size candidate telescope model features a novel aplanatic two-mirror optical design capable of a wide field-of-view with significantly improved imaging resolution as compared to the traditional Davis-Cotton optics design. Achieving this imaging resolution imposes strict alignment requirements to be accomplished by a dedicated alignment system. In this contribution we present the status of the development of the SC optical alignment system, soon to be materialized in a full-scale prototype SC medium-size telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona.
@article{arxiv.1509.02463,
title = {Construction of a medium-sized Schwarzschild-Couder telescope as a candidate for the Cherenkov Telescope Array: development of the optical alignment system},
author = {D. Nieto and S. Griffiths and B. Humensky and P. Kaaret and M. Limon and I. Mognet and A. Peck and A. Petrashyk and D. Ribeiro and J. Rousselle and B. Stevenson and V. Vassiliev and P. Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.02463},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
In Proceedings of the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2015), The Hague, The Netherlands. All CTA contributions at arXiv:1508.05894