Status of the Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II)

The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) aims to detect serendipitous occultations of stars by small (∼0.2 to 30 km diameter) objects in the Trans-Neptunian region and beyond. Such events are very rare (expected measurable event rate around 0.001 events per star per year or less) and short in duration (∼200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence in order to detect events. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, México. With high speed cameras comprising CMOS imagers and a field of view of 2.3 sq. deg., the survey will monitor as many as 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Installation of the TAOS II cameras was completed in 2023, and the final steps in the commissioning of the survey will be completed in 2024 April. In this talk, the observing system will be described and test results on the system performance will be presented.