Palomar Transient Factory

Seeking Amateur Images of M101, Aug 22-24, for Supernova 2011fe

Members of the LCOGT supernova team have been monitoring the evolution of a newly discovered supernova in M101. The discovery was made by the Palomar Transient Factory team on 24 August, which LCOGT astronomers are part of.

Already it has attracted lots of international press attention and made the front page of Astronomy Picture of the Day !

The Palomar Transient Factory: System Overview, Performance and First Results

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a fully-automated, wide-field survey aimed at a systematic exploration of the optical transient sky. The transient survey is performed using a new 8.1 square degree camera installed on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory; colors and light curves for detected transients are obtained with the automated Palomar 60-inch telescope. PTF uses eighty percent of the 1.2-m and fifty percent of the 1.5-m telescope time. With an exposure of 60-s the survey reaches a depth of
Law et al., PASP, accepted

Exploring the Optical Transient Sky with the Palomar Transient Factory

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a wide-field experiment designed to investigate the optical transient and variable sky on time scales from minutes to years. PTF uses the CFH12k mosaic camera, with a field of view of 7.9 deg^2 and a plate scale of 1 asec/pixel, mounted on the the Palomar Observatory 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope. The PTF operation strategy is devised to probe the existing gaps in the transient phase space and to search for theoretically predicted, but not yet detected, phenomena, such as fallback supernovae,
Rau et al. PASP, accepted

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