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W.T. Vestrand, K. Borozdin, S. Brumby, D. Casperson, E. Fenimore, M. Galassi, G. Gisler, K. McGowan, S. Perkins, W. Priedhorsky, P. Wozniak, J. Wren (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
A rich, but relatively unexplored, region in optical astronomy is the study of transients with durations of less than a day. We describe a wide-field optical monitoring system, RAPTOR, that is designed to identify and make follow-up observations of optical transients in real-time. The system is composed of an array of telescopes that continuously monitor about 1600 square degrees of sky for transients down to about 12th magnitude in 60 seconds and a central "fovea" telescope that can reach 16th magnitude in 60 seconds. Coupled to the telescope array is a real-time data analysis pipeline that is designed to identify transients on timescales of seconds. In a manner analogous to human vision, the entire array is mounted on a rapidly slewing robotic mount so that "fovea" of the array can be rapidly directed at transients identified by the wide-field system.