Monday, June 22, 2009 HAT South Telescope Network one step
closer Less than a month after the opening of the SkyMapper
Telescope a new telescope building has appeared at Siding Spring
Observatory. HAT-South is a network of six identical, fully
automated wide field telescopes, which are planned to be located
at three sites (Chile: Las Campanas, Australia: Siding Springs,
and Namibia: HESS site) in the Southern hemisphere. The primary
purpose of the telescope network is to detect and characterize a
large number of extra-solar planets transiting nearby bright
stars, and to explore their diversity. Each site will host two
"TH4" units. These TH4 units consist of four 0.18m Takahashi
astrographs fitted with Apogee 4Kx4K CCDs. Each TH4 unit
monitors 64 square degrees of sky at a time, so each site will
be capable of monitoring 128 square degrees of sky. Operation of
HAT-South is a collaboration among the Harvard-Smithsonian
Centre for Astrophysics (CfA), Max Planck Institute for
Astronomy (MPIA) and the Australian N