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[patrickm]

A new kind of telescope that can photograph the whole sky simultaneously & continuously for $5000

www.technologyreview.com/view/528911/how-to-build-an-evryscope/

"The design is straightforward in principle. It consists of 23 small telescopes mounted on a hemispherical dome that can rotate to track the sky. Each small telescope has a 7 cm aperture and a field of view of a few hundred square degrees. Each one focuses light onto 29 megapixel chip.

The dome is designed so that the fields of view of each of the small telescopes overlap to cover around 10,000 square degrees of sky simultaneously and to produce 0.7 gigapixel images. The dome rotates on equatorial mount so that the Evryscope can record exposures of up to 3 hours before ratcheting back and tracking the next sky area."

[Paulie pchris00]

Maybe we can get an astrophotographer to weigh in here. If I read this correctly, every image will be a two minute exposure, on at most an 85mm lens. I wonder down to what magnitude will they be able to image? And as far as being a useful for detecting transiting exoplanets, I don't get it at all. I have a hard time accepting that so small an aperture, so wide a field per camera, and a relatively long exposure (two minutes?) would yield any useful data on exoplanet transits.

It's an interesting idea, and I'm sure it will turn out good data, but I'd like to see exactly what it's capable of.

[-=CROMAN=-]

Paulie,

Check out the PDF from arXiv.org arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0026v1.pdf