Bologna, Italy – On Thursday, 18 April, during the closing session of the CTAO Science Symposium at Teatro Duse in Bologna, the Managing Director of the CTAO, Dr. Stuart McMuldroch, officially announced the Observatory’s new phase of growth. Supported by the 30M Euro endorsement by the CTAO’s governing bodies in September 2023, this new period … Continued
On February 15, the SST underwent the Product Review, which examined the implementation of actions towards the industrialization of the telescope and the optimization of the maintenance activities.
The CTAO released the final layouts that define the geographical position of the elements (telescopes, calibration systems and atmospheric characterization devices) that will compose the two CTAO arrays according to the approved Alpha Configuration. The particular configuration is the result of a thorough optimization process meant to maximize the scientific performance of the two CTAO arrays.
On the evening of the 25 March, the Barcelona Raman LIDAR Pathfinder installed on the CTA-North site at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma (Spain) achieved first light.
CTA is a large science infrastructure with many individual units and a high degree of complexity. There are many good reasons to design and implement the simplest and most harmonized system possible. One prominent area concerns the Small-Sized Telescope (SST) where harmonization is of very high importance due to the large number of units to be built, operated and maintained.
On Monday 29 April, the Compact High Energy Camera (CHEC) prototype camera, CHEC-S, was installed on the ASTRI-Horn telescope, a prototype Small-Sized Telescope (SST) for CTA. The following day, the camera was turned on and achieved first light, recording thousands of Cherenkov events in the first evening of observations.
The observations of the Crab Nebula were carried out between December 2018 and January 2019, during the ASTRI-Horn telescope verification phase, for a total observation time of about 29 hours, divided in on- and off-axis source exposure.
Building the world’s largest observatory is no small task. It requires meticulous consideration of every aspect of building and maintaining the technology – from funding and foundations to software and safety – and the experience and resources to determine those requirements and plot the path forward. In the past six months, we have been making major strides toward putting all the pieces in place. Here is a summary of some of the main achievements and developments within the Project Office.
On Thursday, 31 August, 2017, a prototype telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the SST-1M, recorded its first events while undergoing testing at the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) in Krakow, Poland. The SST-1M is proposed as one of CTA’s Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs), which will cover the high end of CTA’s energy range, between about 1 and 300 TeV (tera-electronvolts).
During the nights of 25 and 26 May, the camera of the ASTRI telescope prototype recorded its first ever Cherenkov light while undergoing testing at the astronomical site of Serra La Nave (Mount Etna) in Sicily managed by INAF-Catania. This accomplishment was the first optical demonstration for astronomical telescopes using the novel Schwarzschild Couder dual-mirror design.