The Condor Array Telescope with Kenneth Lanzetta, PhD

The Condor Array Telescope is an “array telescope” comprised of six off-the-shelf refracting telescopes and six off-the-shelf large-format CMOS cameras all mounted to a common mount. The telescope is optimized for very low surface-brightness sensitivity, very rapid time resolution, and a very wide field of view. The telescope was deployed to a dark site in New Mexico in 2021 and has been routine operation ever since, autonomously collecting science observations every clear night. Condor has obtained sensitive broad- and narrow-band images of a variety of objects, including extended regions surrounding dwarf novae and very extended regions surrounding nearby galaxies and galaxy groups; has obtained very deep, very-narrow-band images of redshifted Lyman-alpha emission designed to detect the high-redshift circum- and inter-galactic media; and has obtained hundreds of thousands of source hours of rapid-cadence broad-band photometry of white dwarfs. A copy of the telescope is now being deployed to Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert of Chile. In this seminar, Prof. Lanzetta will describe the first science results derived from the new observations obtained by Condor.

Kenneth M. Lanzetta is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Stony Brook University. He obtained a BA in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and a PhD in physics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988. From there he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge in England and then four years as a postdoctoral researcher and Hubble Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences of the University of California, San Diego before taking a position as assistant professor at Stony Brook University in 1994. He was promoted to associate professor in 1997 and to professor in 2001. His research interests involve extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, including issues of galaxy formation and evolution, quasar absorption lines, evolution of the intergalactic medium, detection and identification of faint, high-redshift galaxies, and development and application of optimal image processing techniques utilizing large-scale scientific computing facilities.