Condor Array Telescope Project Team

About the Condor Array Telescope

Research, education, and public outreach

The Condor Array Telescope combines off-the-shelf, consumer-grade components with state-of-the-art computing and information technologies to create a new type of high-performance astronomical telescope.

Research

Optimized for both low-surface-brightness and rapid-cadence observations.

Education

Committed to implementing a broad range of educational possibilities.

Public outreach

Dedicated to sharing cutting-edge discoveries with a wide and diverse audience.

Configuration

The telescope is constructed using off-the-shelf, consumer-grade components.

Condor is an array telescope made up of six 180 mm-diameter refracting telescopes—each equipped with a focal-reducing field corrector, large-format CMOS camera, motorized filter wheel, and motorized focuser—attached to a common remote-controlled mount.

TEC 180 mm-diameter apochromatic refracting telescopes
Astro-Physics 0.72x quad telecompressor correctors
ZWO EFW-7x2" motorized filter wheels
Optec TCF-Leo motorized focusers

Optical baffles coated with Nano-Lab carbon nanotube paint
ZWO ASI6200MM large-format cooled CMOS cameras
Selection of Sloan and LRGB filters
PlaneWave L-600 direct-drive mount

Performance

The telescope is designed to carry out low-surface-brightness and rapid-cadence observations.

Condor is optimized for detecting both extended, low-surface-brightness features and point sources and is capable of efficiently imaging regions of the sky at a rapid cadence of 60 s while remaining sky-noise limited.

Sensor format: 9576 x 6388 pixel $^{2}$
Instantanesous field of view: 2.3 x 1.5 deg $^{2}$
Read noise: 1.1 to 3.5 e $^{-}$
Maximum full-resolution frame rate: 3.2 fps