Science with the Madawaska Highands Obs.

Science with the Madawaska Highlands Observatory is driven by its performance, capabilities and site. Primary among these is the ultra-wide field of almost 5 degrees². Coupled with a high performance camera, fully corrected focal plane, prime focus optical configuration, active optics, low mass primary mirror, carbon fibre sandwich core and fully autonomous nature make, for an overall high performance and high throughput telescope.

The science potential is multifaceted, its core scientific long term project is to detect planets around red-dwarf stars. Its wide field nature makes it ideal for a host of other research projects, such as near Earth Object Detection (NEO), supernovae search, galactic structure, galaxy clusters and super-clusters, astrometry, a wide-field photometry among others.

KEY SCIENCE AREAS

• Galactic structure
• Galaxy clusters and super-clusters
• Near Earth Object Search
• Earth-like planet search around red dwarf stars
• Astrometry
• Wide-Field photometry
• Supernovae search
• Variable star study in the local group
• Galactic light-echo search

The Canadian astronomical community, who lack a wide field imaging telescope will now have a powerful tool that will open up a host possible research possibilities.

The key features of are its ability to map large areas of the sky with good sensitivity and provide significant one-site computing power to permit real time image analysis and data extraction. The science projects described here utilize one or both of these abilities.

KEY TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS ASPECTS

• 5 deg² Field of View
• 1.03 metre clear aperture
• 1.0" FWHM expected seeing
• Fully autonomous nature (robotic)
• 111.5 mega-pixel monolithic digital camera
• 21.80 magnitude/arcsec² sky brightness
• 0.76 arcseconds per pixel prime focus - f/2.5 - 9u pixel
• Fully corrected optics 4u centre and 6u edge - 80%
• 370 - 1000 nm useful spectral range
• 94% QE thinned back illuminated UV enhanced
• 1e-/pix/hour dark noise
• 16 second full download 4e- read noise
• 1.6 second full download 18e- read noise
• 80,000 e- full well capacity
• 16 bit Quantization
• 25^th magnitude in 2000 seconds, 1.25" FWHM (r', s/n=3)
• 1σ= 0.001 mag. in 1500s for a magnitude 17 (r')
• 0.03 arcsecond astrometry 1.25" FWHM s/n=20
• Filters: u', g', r', i', z' + L +wL

KEY SCIENCE SPECIFICATIONS

• Limiting magnitude = 25 (2000s, s/n=3, r', Zθ=0º)
• Photometry = 1σ=0.001 mag. (1500s, r', 17th mag)
• Astrometry = 0.03" (s/n=20. FWHM=1.25")
• Surveys = 5000 deg² (8 hours, mag=22, s/n=3, r')
  

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