Graduate Student Participation and CCD Procurement for the Original PolyOculus Array

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This project continues development of a new telescope configuration that is referred to as PolyOculus, which enables large telescope arrays at significantly lower cost. This allows smaller universities and colleges with limited budgets to engage in forefront research. The system uses small amateur telescopes to create robotic light collectors. These units are pointed at the same target and the light is fed into custom fiber optic cables. A photonic lantern is used to combine the light from the parallel fibers. Light can be further combined again with other similar units to make even bigger telescopes. The PolyOculus system would serve as a pathfinder for studies of targets identified by the Vera Rubin Observatory, to study the nature of Dark Energy and search for Earth-like planets. Follow-up spectroscopy is scientifically important for identifying the basic nature of new sources that are being discovered by time series observation of the night sky (e.g. supernovae, flare stars, tidal disruption events, or new classes of objects), for determining the key physical properties of these events(temperature, composition, radial velocity, outflows, etc.) and to follow the evolution of those properties with time. Traditional large spectroscopic facilities are expensive to construct. This project will develop a method for producing large-area-equivalent telescopes by using photonic technology to link multiple semi-autonomous, small, inexpensive, commercial-off-the-shelf telescopes. Crucially, this scalable design has construction costs which are substantially lower than equivalent traditional large-area telescopes. This project’s innovative array approach represents a new approach to obtaining spectroscopic follow-up for time-domain astronomy. Two graduate students will be engaged in the deployment and commissioning of the instrument at the Mount Laguna Observatory.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.