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ATLAS Static Transients

ATLAS is a quadruple 0.5m telescope system with two units in Hawaii (Haleakala and Mauna Loa), and one each in Chile (El Sauce) and South Africa (Sutherland), see Tonry et al. 2018, (PASP,130:064505). Each telescope is equipped with an STA-1600 10.5x10.5k CCD with 1.86 arcsec pixels giving a FOV of 5.4x5.4 degrees. With the installation of the two southern units, we are robotically surveying the whole sky with a cadence of 1 day between -50 and +50 degrees declination and 2 days in the polar regions, weather permitting. Two broad filters are used, cyan and orange (denoted c and o; all mags quoted are in the AB system). The design sensitivity is around m ~ 20 AB mag. While carrying out the primary mission for Near-Earth Objects, we search for and publicly report stationary transients to the IAU Transient Name Server. Data processing is carried out at Queen's University which combines automated source parameter filtering, machine learning image recognition, and spatial cross-matching with astronomical catalogues (Smith et al. 2020, PASP, 132:085002). More information is on the ATLAS homepage.

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