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rap�tor (rap-tor) n.A bird of prey. [ e.g. Owl, Latin, one who seizes, from rapere, to seize. See rapt.]

Goal: Hunt at night. Locate difficult and elusive prey. Seize it.

RAPTOR is one part of the Thinking Telescopes Technology Project. For more information on the whole project please visit www.thinkingtelescopes.lanl.gov.

A rich, but relatively unexplored, region in optical astronomy is the study of transients with durations of less than a day. We describe a wide-field optical monitoring system, RAPTOR, which is designed to identify and make follow-up observations of optical transients in real-time. The system is composed of an array of telescopes that continuously monitor about 1500 square degrees of the sky for transients down to about 12th magnitude in 60 seconds and a central fovea telescope that can reach 16th magnitude in 60 seconds. Coupled to the telescope array is a real-time data analysis pipeline that is designed to identify transients on timescales of seconds. In a manner analogous to human vision, the entire array is mounted on a rapidly slewing robotic mount so that the fovea of the array can be rapidly directed at transients identified by the wide-field system. The goal of the project is to develop a ground-based optical system that can reliably identify transients in real-time and ultimately generate alerts with source locations to enable follow-up observations with other, larger, telescopes.

WHY?

A surprising fact about modern optical astronomy is that the nightly variation of the optical sky is largely unmonitored. The fact that spectacular celestial transients are being missed was clearly demonstrated by the detection of an optical transient associated with a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) at redshift z=1.6. That cosmological optical transient reached an astounding peak apparent magnitude of 9 --- making it the most luminous optical source ever measured. However, without the real-time position provided by a high-energy satellite that cued robotic optical telescopes to slew to the correct position, the remarkable transient, which was observable potentially even with binoculars, would have been missed. There are reasons to suspect the existence of celestial optical transients that cannot be found through sky monitoring by high-energy satellites. For example, it has been suggested that there may be a class of orphan transients that are detectable as off-axis optical emission from beamed GRBs. It has also been suggested that optical transients could be precursors to GRBs. But an equally exciting possibility is that there are new, as yet undiscovered, classes of rapid optical transients that are completely unrelated to high-energy transients.

Why this has not been done before...

• Need a Fast Pipeline that makes photometric measurements of more than 100,000 sources and identifies transients in less than 30 seconds. (10 times faster than the fastest real-time pipeline)

• Need a Large Field-of-View Telescope Array.(1,000 times wider than normal �wide-field� telescope)

• Must move the more sensitive narrow-field telescopes into the transient in seconds for spectroscopy and light curve measurement. (mounts must move 10 times faster than typical astronomical mounts)

• Must correctly identify, in real time, the celestial transient in the �forest� of non-celestial transients. ( more than 100 false positives for every real event)

RAPTOR A optics platform P. Wozniak at RAPTOR A during mount installation