Technical

FAST (previously called W-FAST; Nir et al. 2021) is a 55cm Schmidt telescope that was built at the Weizmann Institute. It has a field of view of 2.6 x 2.6 degrees and is equipped with a high frame rate, low read noise, CMOS camera. The system can observe at a frame rate of up to 90Hz, but regular observations are conducted at 10-25 Hz.

Data is generated at a high rate of over 6 Gbits/s at a frame rate of 25 Hz and is analyzed in real time. The observatory is fully robotic and capable of autonomously collecting data on a few thousand stars in each field per night.

The telescope was operational for a year when located at the Wise Observatory in Mizpe Ramon, but after moving the telescope to Neot Smadar problems with the camera occurred, such that it is currently in engineering mode.