Nicholas Law
Current wide-field time-domain sky surveys generally operate with few-degree-sized fields and take many individual images to cover large sky areas each night. I will discuss the Evryscope (“wide-seer”), which takes a different approach: using an array of small telescopes to form a single image covering every part of the accessible sky simultaneously and continuously. The Evryscope is a low-cost gigapixel-scale imager with a 8,600 sq. deg. field of view, producing a survey grasp which is more than 10% of LSST's etendue. The system will search for transiting exoplanets around nearby bright stars, M-dwarfs and white dwarfs, monitor variable objects of all types, as well as obtain minute-by-minute imaging of microlensing events, nearby supernovae, and gamma-ray burst afterglows as they happen. The Evryscope has already achieved first light at Chapel Hill, and we will deploy it at CTIO in May. I will also discuss possibilities for a world-wide network of Evryscopes, which could provide a long-term continuous record of all transient and time-variable objects brighter than 18th magnitude, everywhere in the sky.