We have deployed the Argus Pathfinder telescope, the Argus Array prototype, to PARI in the Appalachian mountains. Pathfinder’s hardware, software and data-analysis pipelines have already been extensively tested in Chapel Hill, and the telescope will be commissioned at the PARI dark-sky site over the next few months.
Argus Pathfinder is a 38-telescope prototype of the Argus Array. The system observes a 92-degree stripe of declination in each 15-minute tracking time. In dark time the system tiles across the entire Northern sky each night with >30 30s exposures on each part of the sky. In bright time, Pathfinder takes >900 1s exposures on each part of the sky each night.