Astronomy Colloquium

  Current wide-field time-domain sky surveys generally operate with few-degree-sized fields and take many individual images to cover large sky areas each night. I will discuss the Evryscope ("wide-seer"), which takes a different approach: using an array of small telescopes to form a single image covering every part of the accessible sky simultaneously and continuously. The Evryscope is a low-cost gigapixel-scale imager with a 10,000 sq. deg. field of view, and has an etendue three times larger than the Pan-STARRS sky survey. The system will search for transiting exoplanets around nearby bright stars, M-dwarfs and white dwarfs, as well as obtain minute-by-minute  imaging of microlensing events, nearby supernovae, and gamma-ray burst afterglows as they happen. We plan to deploy the system at CTIO in early 2015. I will present the project status and plans for science operations, as well as an update on the Evryscope prototype telescopes which we are operating near the North Pole (the first High-Arctic astronomical survey).