The Fly's Eye Camera System: An instrument design for large étendue time-domain survey

In this paper we briefly summarize the design concepts of the Fly's Eye Camera System, a proposed high resolution allsky monitoring device which intends to perform high cadence time domain astronomy in multiple optical passbands while still accomplish a high etendue. Fundings have already been accepted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in order to design and build a Fly's Eye device unit. Beyond the technical details and the actual scientific goals, this paper also discusses the possibilities and yields of a network operation involving ∼10 sites distributed geographically in a nearly homogeneous manner. Currently, we expect to finalize the mount assembly – that performs the sidereal tracking during the exposures – until the end of 2012 and to have a working prototype with a reduced number of individual cameras sometimes in the spring or summer of 2013. (© 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)