TOROS

The Transient Optical Robotic Observatory of the South, (TOROS) is being developed as a facility to detect and characterize transient astronomical phenomena including electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources. Its detector had first light at the Felix Aguilar Observatory (FAO) in San Juan Province, Argentina, on September 23, 2024.

commissioning_team — Moises Castillo, Ryan Oelkers, and Richard Camuccio, next to the TOROS detector installed on the FAO Astrograph.

toros_smc — First light image of the Small Magellanic Cloud, stack of 6 x 5 minute exposures.

Detector

The TOROS detector is a STA1600LN a 10560 x 10560 pixel (9 μm) CCD with a 95.04mm x 95.04mm image area. Plate scale is 0.47”/px with a 1.9 square degree field of view.

Planewave Corrector

The detector was installed on an Astrograph, but there are plans to install it on a Planewave CDK24 (f/6.5 Corrected Dall-Kirkham).

The PlaneWave CDK24 will be modified to include a tertiary mirror, three N-BK7 corrector lenses, a fold mirror, and filters (LSST g,r,i,z, and 550-950 nm broadband).