The new Weizmann Astrophysical Observatory (WAO)

Le résumé fourni par la source

The Weizmann Astrophysical Observatory is a new facility constructed and operated by the Weizmann Institute of Science. Located in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, it benefits from clear, dry conditions for most of the year and stable ~1.3″ seeing, with a V-band sky brightness of ~20.9 mag arcsec⁻². The observatory focuses on arrays of small telescopes, leveraging advances in detector technology—especially high-quality sensors with <4 μm pixels to demonstrate that such arrays are more cost effective than a single seeing-limited large telescope of equal collecting area. The site will ultimately host 100 telescopes across two major arrays, the Large Array Survey Telescopes (LAST) and the Multi-Aperture Spectroscopic Telescope (MAST), supported by three hangar-like buildings with a 17m long sliding arced-roof and over 320 squared-meters of concrete for telescopes installation. All observations, reductions, and analyses run automatically in real time, in order for the survey to feed targets to the spectroscopic array for fast characterization. In addition, a dedicated dome and instrument room for testing and spectroscopy is included at the facility.

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