Condor data access is now live!

The Condor Array Telescope provides access to coadded sums of exposures and plans to provide access to individual exposures following an 18-month proprietary period. All "official" Condor data releases are now available at a new data access page. This page provides access to various coadded sums of exposures in gzipped FITS format, together with release notes and instructions for downloading the files.

A new …

The Condor Array Telescope program is soliciting applications from faculty at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for up to two NSF Condor Fellowships in 2023 to carry out projects using the telescope.  Each fellowship offers access to Condor and provides a stipend of $6000.  The focus of the project may involve any combination of research, education, and public outreach.  (Up to two fellowships will be awarded in 2023, and …

The Condor Array Telescope achieved a significant milestone last night: it obtained a first-light image.

Although the image (of a randomly-selected star field) is blurry and out of focus, it is significant in that it indicates that all major telescope systems---optical, mechanical, electronic, and computing---are functioning more or less as expected.

There remains a lot of work to be done, and the next weeks and months will undoubtedly be busy …

The Condor Array Telescope was scheduled to have been deployed to the El Sauce Observatory in the Rio Hurtado Valley of Chile in (Northern Hemisphere) summer of 2020. But 2020 was no ordinary year: Covid intervened, the Chilean border was closed to international travelers, and deployment to this superb astronomical site was necessarily delayed. But we are now pleased to announce that Condor has found a new temporary home at …

The Condor Array Telescope "instrument clusters" that attach the TEC 180 mm telescopes to the PlaneWave L-600 mount have been completed and are ready to be installed. The instrument clusters, which were designed and fabricated by Optec, hold four telescopes on the inside of the mount and two telescopes on the outside of the mount and allow the relative orientations of the telescopes to be easily adjusted. The installation and …

We are pleased to announce a scientific collaboration agreement with the University of Chile. The agreement calls for the University of Chile and Stony Brook University to collaborate on the scientific and technical development of the Condor Array Telescope, which is to be located at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile. According to terms of the agreement, (1) the import of all materials and implements that are necessary for the …

The Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi4) is a powerful and inexpensive computer. We plan to use an array of eight RPi4s to control the six individual telescopes that make up the prototype element of the Condor Array Telescope and to handle scheduling and sequencing, preliminary data processing, data storage, and data archiving.

To test the configuration, we purchased four RPi4s each with 4 GB of memory back in March of this …

We plan to control the Condor Array Telescope at its home in the El Sauce Observatory of the Rio Hurtado Valley of Chile using an array of eight Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi4) computers. Each RPi4 contains two USB 3 and two USB 2 interfaces, making the computers ideal for controlling the cameras, motorized filter wheels, motorized focusers, and motorized dust covers associated with the six telescopes that comprise Condor. (Each …

Welcome to the Condor Array Telescope!

In early August 2019, we learned that we were to receive funding from the NSF Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation program for our proposal "Concept Feasibility Study for a High-Performance Telescope Array." The proposal described the construction and operation of the prototype element of an "array telescope" consisting of six refracting telescopes, each equipped with a focal-reducing field corrector, motorized focuser, and motorized filter wheel, …