The Evryscope: design and performance of the first full-sky gigapixel-scale telescope

Abstract

The Evryscope is a new type of telescope which covers the entire accessible sky in each exposure. Its 8000- square-degree field-of-view and 691 MPix telescope is sensitive to exoplanet transits and other short timescale events not discernible from existing large-sky-area astronomical surveys. The telescope, which places 24 separate individual telescopes into a common mount which tracks the entire accessible sky with only one moving part, is building 1%-precision, many-year-length, high-cadence light curves for every accessible object brighter than ~16th magnitude. The camera readout times are short enough to provide near-continuous observing, with a 97% survey time efficiency. The Evryscope has the largest survey grasp of any current ground-based survey, and for bright-object high-cadence observations is the only existing survey within an order of magnitude of LSST's etendue. We deployed the Evryscope, funded by NSF/ATI, at CTIO in May 2015. We here present the telescope design, performance, and project status.