http://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0026.pdf

Most current general time-domain sky surveys (e.g. the Palomar Transient Factory, Pan-STARRS, SkyMapper, CRTS, ATLAS) image thousands of square degrees each night in few-degree-wide segments and use large apertures to achieve deep imaging in those areas. The resulting survey is necessarily optimized for events such as supernovae that occur on day-or-longer timescales. However, these surveys are not sensitive to the very diverse class of shorter-timescale objects, including transiting exoplanets, young stellar variability, eclipsing binaries, microlensing planet events, gamma ray bursts, young supernovae, and other exotic transients.

To reach these rare short-timescale events we are building an instrument that takes a different approach. Current time-domain wide-field sky surveys generally operate with few-degree-sized fields and take many individual images to cover large sky areas each night. We present the design and project status of the Evryscope Wideseer, which usies an array of 7cm telescopes to form a single wide-field-of-view pointed at every part of the accessible sky simultaneously and continuously. The Evryscope is a gigapixel-scale imager with a 9060 sq. deg. field of view and has an etendue three times larger than the Pan-STARRS sky survey. The system will search for transiting exoplanets around bright stars, M-dwarfs and white dwarfs, as well as detecting microlensing events, nearby supernovae, and gamma-ray burst afterglows. We present the current project status, including an update on the Evryscope prototype telescopes we have been operating for the last three years in the Canadian High Arctic.

What if these cameras were video cameras

and a computer program analyzed each video frame?

or would that result in too much information

or do they already use video cameras?

Might become a new zooniverse project.

CrazyNeutrino said:

What if these cameras were video cameras

and a computer program analyzed each video frame?

or would that result in too much information

or do they already use video cameras?

I think that would be great. Especially if they could feed the results into a computer program such as RegiStax. Using a program such as this, it would be possible to first automatically remove blurred frames, such as those due to cloud, and second to use sub-pixel registration to align the images so that the images of stars didn’t move even a fraction of a pixel from one frame to the next, and third to almost completely remove random noise from one image to the next by stacking the images on top of one another.

I don’t have the full specs of this telescope, but suspect that a still camera is used. I was looking at the possibility of getting a camera for astrophotography and eliminated the idea because cost goes up as the physical size of the sensor (as opposed to the number of pixels) goes up and for elimination of background noise the the largest sensor needs to be used – either 35 mm or, better, medium format. Nothing else will do. So that costs. A still camera would also tend to have more pixels.

To keep the storage down, real-time processing of the form I mentioned above is a must.

I would love to have a camera and software like that that could automatically film astronomical objects too faint for the eye to see near the horizon consistently just after sunset and just before sunrise each day to catch things (variable stars, comets etc.) that are as close to the Sun as possible.