Technical details of OmegaTranS

OmegaTranS will make use of the Omegacam CCD camera on the newly built VLT survey Telescope. Read more about the VST and Omegacam here

The Telescope

The VLT survey telescope (VST), still under construction in Napoli, is a 2.6m modified Ritchey-Cretien telescope which will be installed on Paranal in 2007. It is specifically designed for wide-field imaging and has been optimised for excellent image quality in natural seeing.

The CCD camera

OmegaCAM is a 1 square degree wide field, optical, 16k X 16k camera for the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). It consists of 32 low-noise array, resulting in 0.26 arcsecond pixels. It has been build by a consortium of German, Dutch and Italian institutes.



Observing strategy

At first instance, 3 weeks of bright GTO time (plus additional time that will be persued through GO rounds) will be used to monitor 4 densely populated star fields towards the galactic disk at low declination. Cycle time will be approximately 8.5 minutes, with 20 sec. exposures - targeting about ~70,000 F,G, and K dwarf stars at R=13.5-17.5 for at least 1500 epochs during the first observing season.

Data Processing

The data reduction will be performed in the (hardware and software) framework of AstroWise, using difference imaging. The expected data flow is 4.5 Tbyte per year (1.5 Tb per partner), well within the capacity of AstroWise.