12/05/13 Nick Konidaris SO/NOAO Joint Colloquium Series
Dr. Nick Konidaris,
Caltech
The SED Machine
Abstract
Wide-field telescopes, enormous CCDs, and sophisticated software pipelines have led us to the epoch of "time-domain" astronomy. Synoptic surveys are now efficient detecting new transient events. Indeed, with today's technology it is possible to discover a supernova every 20 minutes. At the same time, we have not realized the full gains of these discoveries because we lack sufficient spectroscopic capability to classify transients.
I present the SED Machine, a low-resolution high-throughput prism spectrograph that will classify transient events down to 21st magnitude. The first SED Machine has recently been commissioned on the Palomar 60-inch telescope, and yet more copies are needed and wanted. In my talk I discuss the design and execution of this instrument, as well as preliminary results from commissioning. I will end with a vision for robotic telescopes with classification spectrographs.
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