The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Observing System (OS) is the data collector for the ZTF project to study astrophysical phenomena in the time domain. ZTF OS is based upon the 48-inch aperture Schmidt-type design Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. It incorporates new telescope aspheric corrector optics, dome and telescope drives, a large-format exposure shutter, a flat-field illumination system, a robotic bandpass filter exchanger, and the key element: a new 47-square-degree, 600 megapixel cryogenic CCD mosaic science camera, along with supporting equipment. The OS collects and delivers digitized survey data to the ZTF Data System (DS). Here, we describe the ZTF OS design, optical implementation, delivered image quality, detector performance, and robotic survey efficiency.
@article{arxiv.2008.04923,
title = {The Zwicky Transient Facility: Observing System},
author = {Richard Dekany and Roger M. Smith and Reed Riddle and Michael Feeney and Michael Porter and David Hale and Jeffry Zolkower and Justin Belicki and Stephen Kaye and John Henning and Richard Walters and John Cromer and Alex Delacroix and Hector Rodriguez and Daniel J. Reiley and Peter Mao and David Hover and Patrick Murphy and Rick Burruss and John Baker and Marek Kowalski and Klaus Reif and Phillip Mueller and Eric Bellm and Matthew Graham and Shrinivas R. Kulkarni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.04923},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
31 pages, 26 figures, 5 tables; published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific