Developments at Palomar

S. R. Kulkarni

California Institute of Technology

Telescopes at Palomar

• Zwicky’s 18-inch (not in use)

• Hale 200-inch

• Oschin 48-inch Schmidt

• 60-inch

• 20-inch dome:

99-mm copy of STARE (Charbonneau)

• 24-inch telescope (Mike Brown; Fall)

P200: Large Format Camera

• Six 2K by 4K Site thinned CCDs

• Prime focus with Wynne corrector

• FOV = 25 by 24 arcmin

built by M. Metzger

P200: Wide Field IR Camera

• Prime Focus NIR camera

• 2K by 2K Hawaii-II

• FOV = 8.7 arcmin by 8.7 arcmin

led by S. Eikneberry, Cornell

Pharo + AO

• 1K by 1K Hawaii

• 0.040 or 0.025 arcsec/pixel

• Grism (spectral resolution of 1500)

• Coronagraphic stop

• Guide star V=11 in reasonable seeing; can push to V=13.5 in good seeing

led by R. Dekany (JPL), T.Hayward(Cornell)

QUEST

• 112 CCDs, 600 by 2400 pixels

• FOV = 4.6 deg by 3.6 deg (10 sq degree effective area)

• Drift scan or Point & Shoot

led by C. Baltay (Yale)

Projects with Quest

• Yale-Indiana, 40% of time

Quasar variability survey

Intermediate redshift SN• JPL, 40% of time

Near-earth asteroids• Caltech, 20% of time

KBOs (Quahar and Plutos)

High redshift quasars

P60: Dedicated for Transient Object Astronomy

• Telescope now fully automated

• New CCD detector (Harrison)

• Software pipeline (Fox and IPAC)

led by S. Kulkarni & F. Harrison

P60 now in routine operation

• 20% of time for Caltech community

(non TOO observations; que scheduled)

• 10% of time for IPAC

(non TOO observations; que scheduled)

• 70% of time for GRB project

=> Launch of Swift (September 2004)

Sleuth (Stare): Planet Search

• Sleuth is patterned after T. Brown’s successful Stare project (HD 209458 fame)

• In routine operation

• Many false positives being detected (10 mag)

led by D. Charbonneau

Palomar Testbed Interferometer

• 100-m baseline, 40-cm siderostats

• H, K bands

• Highlights: M dwarf diameter determination

Pulsations of Cepheid variable

Herbig Ae/Be star

Distance to Pleiades via AtlasX-P Pan, M. Shao & S. Kulkarni(Nature, negotiating with Editor)

• Pleiades is a gold standard for intermediate mass stars, brown dwarfs and Cepheid distance scale

• Hipparcos team published distance to Pleiades

D = 118 +/- 4 pc• Traditional distance (color-mag diagram) D = 131 +/- 3 pc

Hipparcos result generated “lively” controversy.

Orbit of Atlas (Mark III & PTI)

P(orbit)= 291day

a = 13 mas

e = 0.245

Inclination=108d

Distance via Kepler’s 3rd lawA3 = d3 a3= (m1+m2)P2

Search for Planets in Binary Stars

• Lane and Mutterspaugh have demonstrated very narrow angle astrometry with PTI (fringe scanning)

• We are starting a 3-yr survey to search astrometrically for planets in speckle binaries

• Konacki has successfully achieved 10 m/s RV for binary stars with HIRES