The aim of this project is to enable impactful research by deploying a new astronomical "movie mode" on the Huntsman Telescope. Movie mode is enabled by the same image sensor technology that is found in mobile phone cameras. Driven by considerable consumer demand, these sensors are now very sensitive and can take much higher data rates compared to sensors normally used in astronomical instrumentation.
Huntsman is one of the first professional astronomy facilities to use this new sensor technology. We have conducted 3 observational proof-of-concept studies in significant areas of astrophysics: exomoon and exoplanet ring detection, tracking a flare star breakout phase and detection of Betelgeuse flux variations during the daytime. Furthermore, we have trialed a daytime satellite monitoring mode, which has activated a Research Translation collaboration with an industry partner.
In the first semester of this project ADACS were able to use the proof-of-concept work to develop a new command line tool that would efficiently capture "move mode" observations from the Huntsman Cameras. Additionally, ADACS software developers undertook a review of the architecture of the telescope control and observing software and have made plans for a second semeser's work, in which the "movie mode" observations will be implemented into the telescope control software.
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ADACS significantly enhanced the NaCo pipeline by parallelising key functions within the VIP library, reducing execution times by a factor of six and enabling more efficient processing of direct imaging data from the ESO archive and beyond.
ADACS developers collaborated with the Parallel Bilby team to overhaul their code, improving its structure, establishing tests for reproducibility, and instilling good development practices. This work set the foundations for future improvements to th
ADACS developed a web-based viewer for the 4HS team to quickly visualise and evaluate survey data, generating HiPS data on demand and helping identify and fix data issues, improving survey quality.