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Technical details of OmegaTranS
OmegaTranS will make use of the Omegacam CCD camera on the newly built VLT survey Telescope (operational early 2006). Read more about the VST and Omegacam here
The Telescope
The VLT survey telescope (VST), now under construction in Napels, is a 2.6m modified Ritchey-Cretien telescope which will stand on Paranal. It is specifically designed for wide-field imaging, and has been optimised for excellent image quality in natural seeing.
The CCD camera
OmegaCAM is a 1 square degree wide field, optical, 16k X 16k camera for the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). It consists of 32 low-noise array, resulting in 0.26 arcsecond pixels. It has been build by a consortium of Dutch, Italian, and German institutes.
Observing strategy
At first instance, 3 weeks of bright GTO time (plus additional time that will be persued through GO rounds) will be used to monitor 4 densely populated star fields towards the galactic disk at low declination. Cycle time will be approximately 8.5 minutes, with 20 sec. exposures - targeting about ~200,000 F,G, and K dwarf stars at R=13.5-17.5 for at least 1000 epochs during the first observing season.
Data Processing
The data reduction will be performed in the (hardware and software) framework of AstroWise, using difference imaging. The expected data flow is 3.5 Tbyte per year (1.5 Tb per partner), well within the capacity of AstroWise.
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