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CONCAM at the Wise Observatory
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A panoramic CCD camera saw its first-light on the roof of
the Wise Observatory in Mizpe Ramon on 27 June 2001.
The instrument consists of an automatic CCD camera
coupled to a fish-eye lens and a computer. It operates
automatically taking pictures of the night sky
throughout the night.
The original FITS images
with corresponding JPEGs and latest MOVIES
are locally archived in
http://wise-concam.tau.ac.il/concam/archive/images.html.
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This first-light image obtained before the final
adjustments of the CONCAM, shows Mars in the south-west (the bright elongated spot at the bottom of the frame). The bright star near the center, next to the Milky Way is Vega, which makes the top of the summer triangle. Arcturus is setting in the west (right), barely touching the antenna.
Stars as faint as sixth magnitude can be seen in the
image, which was exposed for three minutes.
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LAIWO - Large Area Imager for the
Wise Observatory
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LAIWO is an array of four CCDs, 4k x 4k pixels each. The overall field of
view is one square degree, with a pixel scale of 0.44 arcsec/pixel. Its
uses will include a search for transiting extrasolar planets.
The project is a collaboration between the Wise Observatory at
Tel Aviv University, Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg,
and the Institute for Astrophysics, University of Goettingen.
Using the Wise observatory 1m telescope we monitor lensed quasars, in order to detect the
time-delay between the images.
The Wise Observatory takes part in MicroFUN, a Microlensing
Follow-Up Network.
Microfun follows up ongoing microlensing events detected by the OGLE and MOA
collaborations toward the Galactic bulge.
The more closely spaced monitoring provided by the network allows the
detection of deviations of the light curves from those of point lenses
and sources. The network's combined data can reveal binary lenses and
sources, parallax effects, extended source effects, and the presence
of planets near the lens or the source. Wise Observatory contributes
to the network during the summer months, when the Galactic center is
visible.
The Palomar-Green
(PG) quasars monitoring project took place at the
Wise Observatory from 1991 to 1998. In this project about a third of the PG
quasars were monitored monthly in B and R bands and about half of these
were monitored spectrophotometrically (with additional observations
from Steward Observatory).
The project results, which are descried in the papers linked,
are one of the best quasars variability studies ever done, and enabled to
determine, for the first time, the relationships between the
broad-line region size, the black hole mass, and the luminosity, of Active
Galactic Nuclei.
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TAVAS - Tel Aviv
Astronomical Variability Survey
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The Tel-Aviv Astronomical Variability Survey (TAVAS; PI:
Dan Maoz) is an
imaging survey of about 150 square degrees, distributed in some 300
individual Galactic and extragalactic fields distributed over
the sky. Observations were carried out between January 2004 and September
2006 using the Wise Observatory
1m telescope with the Maala focal reimager
and the SITe 2k x 4k CCD. Observations (2 x 210 s) were unfiltered, with
the instrument+CCD response resulting in an effective broad R bandpass,
typically reaching R=21 mag with S/N=5. Objects fainter than about
15 mag are unsaturated. The typical field's cadence was two weeks.
After excising regions of large optical distortion,
each final TAVAS field has dimensions of 2k x 3k pixels with 1"/pixel, or
30' x 55'.
Useful TAVAS data were obtained during more than 300 nights,
resulting in over 5000 images.
See
Elinor Medezinski's MSc thesis
for additional technical details
on TAVAS motivation, instrumentation, survey
fields, data characteristics, survey strategy/scheduling, data reduction,
and data products. Observations by TAVAS have been
published in several papers on microlensing
searches for extrasolar planets, and on
lensed quasar time delays.
In particular, TAVAS measurements were
critical in the discovery via microlensing of the ``Jupiter'' in the
extrasolar planetary system
OGLE-2006-BLG-199Lb,c, the first
extrasolar system that resembles the solar system. TAVAS contributed
53 epochs to the measurement of the time delays between lensed images
of the quasar
SDSSJ1004+4112, a quasar quintuply lensed by a cluster of
galaxies. TAVAS data are being incorporated
into Peter Nugent's
Deep Sky project.
The Wise Observatory is taking an active part
in the international network of optical observatories entitled the
Whole Earth
Telescope.
A group of observatories, extending over 6 continents,
are observing together for about 10 or more days one and the same astronomical
object. The distribution of the observing station around Earth, enables a
continuous photometric monitoring of the target object for the entire duration
of such a long period of time. The "temporal spectroscopy" of variable stars
provides observational data on masses and on the
internal structure of stars that have no parallel in any other mode of
astronomical observations.
See also the
Fast Photometry Project of the Wise Observatory.
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WHAT ( Wise observatory
Hungarian-made
Automated
Telescope )
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WHAT is a small robotic telescope located at the Wise Observatory. The telescope is designed to be fully automated and be controlled remotely via a web-interface. The WHAT consists of a Canon 200 mm f/1.8 lens and an Apogee AP10 2048x2048 pixel CCD, yielding an 8.2x8.2 degree field of view.
The project is a collaboration between the
Wise Observatory
of the Tel-Aviv University and
Konkoly Observatory
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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WOOTS
( Wise
Observatory
Optical
Transient
Search )
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The Wise Observatory
Optical Transients
Search (WOOTS)
is a program to find Supernovae (SNe) and other optical transients in
163 medium-redshift (z between 0.06 and 0.2) Abell galaxy clusters,
using the Wise Observatory 1m telescope in Israel.
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Past Project 
Ongoing Project
