Princeton University Extrasolar Planet Discussion Group

The Evryscopes are a North-South pair of ultra-wide-field telescopes with an instantaneous field of view covering 16,512 square degrees at 13.2"/pixel resolution. The Evryscopes observe continuously at two-minute cadence to a depth of 15.5 in g-band, making them sensitive to a variety of rapidly-evolving phenomena, including superflares from cool stars, optical counterparts to multi-messenger transients, and millisecond-scale reflections from Earth satellites. Data from the Evryscopes are analyzed by the Evryscope Fast Transient Engine (EFTE) in real time, which produces low-latency transient alerts and indexes images for later reduction into long-term photometric light curves from the full 5-year Evryscope dataset. EFTE records candidates within each Evryscope's two-minute cadence for 98.5% of images, and those that pass a series of automated vetting checks are reported to users for verification and optionally for delegation to followup resources. EFTE provides an extensible, robust architecture for transient surveys probing similar timescales, and will serve as the software test bed for the 900-telescope Argus Optical Array, a next generation all-sky observatory with a collecting area equivalent to that of a 5-meter telescope and a data rate 62x higher than the Evryscopes. Argus Pathfinder, a 38-telescope prototype system, is currently under construction and will be deployed to the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in November 2022. Pathfinder will image the northern sky in 15-minute increments at either 1-second (mg’=16.1) or 30-second (mg’=19.1) cadence, covering the entire sky once per day to mg’=21.3 with coaddition. In this talk, I will give an overview of the Evryscope and Argus Optical Array projects, share early results from a low-latency followup program targeting stellar super flares with the Goodman Spectrograph on the SOAR 4.1-m, and introduce the public data products from both surveys.