The SkyMapper 1.3 m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory has now begun regular operations. Alongside the Southern Sky Survey, a comprehensive digital survey of the entire southern sky, SkyMapper will carry out a search for supernovae and other transients. The search strategy, covering a total footprint area of ~2000 deg2 with a cadence of ≤5 days, is optimised for discovery and follow-up of low-redshift type Ia supernovae to constrain cosmic expansion and peculiar velocities. We describe the search operations and infrastructure, including a parallelised software pipeline to discover variable objects in difference imaging; simulations of the performance of the survey over its lifetime; public access to discovered transients; and some first results from the Science Verification data.
@article{arxiv.1702.05585,
title = {The SkyMapper Transient Survey},
author = {Richard Scalzo and Fang Yuan and Michael J. Childress and Anais Moller and Brian Schmidt and Brad E. Tucker and Bonnie Zhang and Pierre Astier and Marc Betoule and Nicolas Regnault},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.05585},
year = {2017}
}