Telescope
In order to take advantage of the Commercial-Off-The-Shelf near-infrared detectors and achieve the required survey speed, DREAMS requires a large number of parts for a telescope of its size.
The cross-section above shows the major components of the telescope, for further details on these parts and more, click on the individual links below.
Detector and Filters
In order to achieve the large number of pixels required for its large field-of-view, DREAMS will use 6x Princeton Infrared Technologies 1280Scicam Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs) cameras. InGaAs detectors are not traditionally used in astronomical applications due to their higher noise properties and a shorter cut-off wavelength.
Location
DREAMS will be located at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia in the UNSW APT Building.
Mount
DREAMS uses a German Equatorial Mount, the ASA DDM500, with an extremely high skew rate to cover the entire visible sky as required. The DDM500 uses direct drives and absolute encoders to achieve a slew speed of up to 50 degrees per seconds and a pointing accuracy of less than 8 arcseconds.
Optics
In order to fully utilise the COTS InGaAs detectors used for DREAMS, DREAMS has a unique optical design that converts the F/6 telescope beam into a F/2 beam on the detector.
Software
The software for DREAMS can be categorised into two major components, Operations and Data Reduction. The operations control system is based upon the ANU 2.3m telescope and the Data Reduction Pipeline for DREAMS is utilises mirar.
With thanks to
The construction of a telescope would not be possible without the assistance of a wide range of people and organisations. The DREAMS team would like to thank the following:
Astro Systeme Austria
Optimax
Alison Steves
Laura Capperell
Prime Optics
Princeton Infrared Technologies
Rainbow Research Optics
Monica Acosta
Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University
Kyle Butler
Michael Copeland
Research School of Physics, Australian National University
Chris Stokes-Griffin
Paul Compston