Snoop: the Palomar All-Sky Surveillance Camera

As a means of improving our ability to evaluate astronomical observing conditions, graduate students Luke Kotredes and Francis O’Donovan, and advisor David Charbonneau installed a new all-sky camera at Palomar Observatory. The Observatory, located in northern San Diego County, California, is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology. It supports the research activities of members of the Astronomy Department (such as our work for TrES) and other Caltech departments, as well as that of researchers at Caltech’s collaborating institutions. We provided the original webpage as a resource to observers who were either present at Palomar or gathering data with one of its robotic telescopes. Curious onlookers were also welcome! Observers could then compare what they saw with the map of the current sky overhead (from Fourmilab for example).

The All-Sky Camera projected the full sky onto the circular image format that you see in the example images below. North is at the top of the image, and East is to the left. Snoop was a modified camera produced by Santa Barbara Instrument Group, and was controlled by a workstation running Linux RedHat. It was located in the same enclosure as Sleuth, our automated telescope that is searching for extrasolar planets, and Sherlock, our follow-up telescope.

We hope you enjoyed the view, and keep watching the skies!

Some sample images from Snoop:

• Meteors visible during the 2004 Perseid Meteor Shower!
• Snoop obtains evidence of an invasion of giant killer bugs!!!
• The Laser Guide Star (LGS) for the Adaptive Optics (AO) system on the Palomar 200-inch telescope, visible in the Palomar sky.