The Zwicky Transient Facility: Wide-Field Imaging at DESY

Marek Kowalski (DESY)
Seminar room 3, 3.00 pm

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new astronomical time-domain survey that will have first light at Palomar Observatory in 2017. ZTF will use a new camera with a 47 square degree field of view mounted on the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Schmidt telscope. ZTF's extremely wide field and fast readout electronics will enable a survey nearly an order of magnitude faster than the largest astronomical surveys today. Besides the technological challenges, I will discuss some of the scientific opportunities of the survey, ranging from cosmology to a search for the sources of the high energy astrophysical neutrinos recently detected by IceCube.