The Trans-Neptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II)
Session 5.03 Occulations (Blind)
Tuesday 06-25 | 16:40 - 17:00

The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, México to search for serendipitous occultations of stars by small (~300 m to 30 km diameter) objects in the Trans-Neptunian region and beyond. Such events are very rare (<0.001 events per star per year), so many stars must be monitored to detect a significant number of events. In addition, the typical occultation events that will be discovered by this survey are extremely short in duration (~200 ms), so high-cadence imaging is required to resolve such events. With high-speed cameras comprising custom CMOS imagers and a field of view of 2.3 sq. deg., the survey will monitor as many as 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Installation of the TAOS II cameras was completed in 2023, and the final steps in the commissioning of the survey will be completed in the summer of 2024. In this talk, the observing system will be described and test results on the system performance will be presented.

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