Study of rapidly varying astrophysical objects with the Pi-of-the-Sky apparatus

"Pi of the Sky" is a detector designed for search for optical flashes of the cosmic origin in the sky. Its primary goal is to look for optical afterglows associated with the gamma ray bursts (GRB), but it is also good to tool to study any kind of short timescale astrophysical phenomena. The apparatus consists of two arrays of 16 cameras each, which allow for simultaneous observation of big fraction of the sky. Due to on-line data analysis in the real time, it has self-triggering capability and can react to external triggers with negative time delay. The prototype with two cameras has been installed at Las Campanas (Chile) and was operational in period since June 2004 till August 2005 and upgraded in June 2006. Database for storing large amount of astronomical measurements was developed. The general idea of experiment, apparatus and data analysis in the experiment will be presented.© (2006) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.