Wide angle high speed photometry

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jürgen H.M.M. Schmitt
• Subject Area: Astrophysics and Astronomy
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 319271541

Scintillation, i.e., the ''twinkling'' of stars, is the limiting factor for all optical ground-based photometry, even at large telescopes. The usual approach to beat down on scintillation noise is the use of large telescopes and long integration times. In this funding application we propose to use a different ansatz: We propose to conduct simultaneous high-speed observations of samples of stars. In this fashion we can sample measurements along multiple lines of sights, which are characterized by the same scintillation power. Hence the technique of ensemble photometry is extended to very short time scales to include accurate measurements of the scintillation power in the sample.In order to obtain the necessary observations a wide field telescope with a high speed camera is necessary. To work economically we use commercial equipment in the form of a C14 telescope with a hyperstar lens, which effectively acts as a Schmidt camera with a field of view of 1.4 square degrees.For imaging we propose to utilize the recently developed scientific sCMOS technology, which provides active pixel detectors with a peak quantum efficiency is 57% at 550 nm and a full frame (2560 x 2160 pixels) read-out capability of 100 Hz at a read-out noise level of 1.4~e-/pixel will a full well capacity of about 30000 e-. For data storage we propose to construct a system that is able to take and store thedata ''in real time'' and propose to accomplish this with a server system that reads the data out of the camera buffer and transfer the data with a fiber link to a RAID server.In the context of this funding application we want to setup a working system, capable of producing and storing full frames at a rate of 100 Hz for at about five hours; the proposed system generates about 15 Tbyte of data during that time. With this system we want to perform a number of key science observations in the fields of scintillation theory, extrasolar planets, bright variable stars, flare stars and lunar occultation studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants