The Argus Array: low-cost access to the deep, high-cadence sky

The Argus Array will be the first large optical telescope capable of exploring the entire sky simultaneously. Consisting of 900 small-aperture telescopes with ultra-low-noise detectors multiplexed into a 55 GPix array, Argus will have the equivalent collecting area of a 5m telescope but will explore the sky in a very different way from conventional survey telescopes. Each Argus exposure covers 8,000 square degrees with a sampling of 1.4"/pixel; this enormous field of view allows the Array to achieve deep imaging by observing every part of the sky at cadences as fast as one second – for 6-10 hours each night. Realtime transient detection systems will process the incoming images at TB/sec speeds on a high-speed GPU cluster. Over five years, the Array will build a publicly-available, two-color, million-epoch movie of the northern sky, giving the astronomical community the unprecedented ability to follow the evolution of every deep time-variable source across the sky simultaneously. We will detail the current status of the Argus project, including construction plans and first results from the on-sky Argus Pathfinder hardware and software prototype system.