The Zwicky Transient Facility: Observing System
preprint
posted on 2023-11-30, 20:21 authored by Richard Dekany, Roger M. Smith, Reed Riddle, Michael Feeney, Michael Porter, David Hale, Jeffry Zolkower, Justin Belicki, Stephen Kaye, John Henning, Richard Walters, John Cromer, Alex Delacroix, Hector Rodriguez, Daniel J. Reiley, Peter Mao, David Hover, Patrick Murphy, Rick Burruss, John Baker, Marek Kowalski, Klaus Reif, Phillip Mueller, Eric Bellm, Matthew Graham, Shrinivas R. KulkarniThe Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Observing System (OS) is the data collector for the ZTF project to study astrophysical phenomena in the time domain. ZTF OS is based upon the 48-inch aperture Schmidt-type design Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. It incorporates new telescope aspheric corrector optics, dome and telescope drives, a large-format exposure shutter, a flat-field illumination system, a robotic bandpass filter exchanger, and the key element: a new 47-square-degree, 600 megapixel cryogenic CCD mosaic science camera, along with supporting equipment. The OS collects and delivers digitized survey data to the ZTF Data System (DS). Here, we describe the ZTF OS design, optical implementation, delivered image quality, detector performance, and robotic survey efficiency.
