Paper 13094-191
Panopticon: a telescope for our times
Abstract
We present a design for a wide-field spectroscopic telescope. The only large powered mirror is spherical, the resulting spherical aberration is corrected for each target separately, giving exceptional image quality. The telescope is a transit design, but still allows all-sky coverage. Three simultaneous modes are proposed: (a) natural seeing multi-object spectroscopy with 12m aperture over 3° FoV with ~25,000 targets; (b) multi-object AO with 12m aperture over 3° FoV with ~100 AO-corrected Integral Field Units each with 4” FoV; (c) ground layer AO-corrected integral field spectroscopy with 15m aperture and 13' FoV. Such a telescope would be uniquely powerful for large-area follow-up of imaging surveys; in each mode, the AOmega and survey speed exceed all existing facilities combined. The expected cost of this design is relatively modest, much closer to $500M than $1000M.
Presenter
Australian Astronomical Optics, Macquarie Univ. (Australia)
Will Saunders obtained his doctorate in 1990 from the University of London, in statistical cosmology with redshift surveys. He was a PPARC Advanced Fellow at Oxford University and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Edinburgh University. Since 2000 he has worked with the Australian Astronomical Observatory and then Australian Astronomical Optics - Macquarie as Instrument Scientist, with interests in all aspects of wide-field spectroscopic surveys.