What is Huntsman?
The Huntsman Telescope is designed to take extremely faint images of astronomical objects in the Southern sky.
Huntsman is made up from an array of Canon telephoto lenses, inspired by the innovative Dragonfly Telephoto Array.
Huntsman will help answer some outstanding questions in modern astrophysics research:
- Galaxy formation and evolution, including stellar disk formation
- Galaxy growth through the assembly of satellite galaxies
- Mitigating and understanding gas turbulence in the Galactic interstellar medium
- Understand the relationship between stellar and cold neutral hydrogen gas assembly
- The number of long-period exoplanets around TESS stellar systems
What are we doing now?
At the moment the Huntsman team are tuning the fully automated observing mode of Huntsman.
Huntsman will open itself each night (if the skies are clear), select the best target and starting collecting data.
Our first goal is to obtain data using both the Canon lenses and a more conventional astronomical telescope, which is the large white and orange tube at the top Huntsman in the photo.
Where is Huntsman?
Huntsman is located in Australia at Siding Spring Observatory, a 7-hour drive from Sydney, Australia.
As shown in the photograph taken by @HoseinHashemi9, Huntsman is located about 1,165 metres (3,822 ft) above sea level in the Warrumbungle National Park on Mount Woorat.
The surrounding communities are keen on helping astronomers see their faint targets by minimising the use of street lamps at night to reduce light pollution.
Want to get involved?
Visit Macquarie Observatory in Sydney, Australia for our weekly observing sessions.
Consider obtaining a Bachelor of Science with a Major in Astronomy and Astrophysics (the only one available in NSW) at Macquarie University and you'll get to visit and use Huntsman during your degree.
Use or contribute to our open source image processing and observatory control python code at our Github page.
Check out the related space telescope mission to obtain extremely faint images from a satellite named SkyHopper.
Contact Lee Spitler, the Principal Investigator of Huntsman, if you:
- are an astronomer interested in collaborating
- have any general or technical questions about Huntsman
- would like him or someone on his team to give a talk about Huntsman
- are a keen undergrad with a strong background in astronomy, physics, statistics or computing and are interested in working on a summer/winter project or as a Masters or PhD student (check out the current listing of projects here)
The Huntsman Collaboration
Technical and science team
|Amir Ebadati Bazkiaei||Macquarie PhD student||expert in mock galaxy imaging|
|Sarah Caddy||Macquarie Masters student||expert in the "Huntsman in Space" efforts|
|Wilfred Gee||Macquarie PhD student||software guru and small aperture telescope expert|
|Anthony Horton||AAO-MQ Instrument Scientist||Huntsman technical lead|
|Steve Lee||ANU AAT Head Night Assistant||expert in deploying automated telescopes|
|Fergus Longbottom||Macquarie PhD student||imaging analysis expert|
|Jaime Andrés Alvarado Montes||Macquarie Masters student||exoplanet monitoring expert|
|Lee Spitler||Macquarie academic||Huntsman Principal Investigator|
|Erwin de Blok||ASTRON||lead of MHONGOOSE survey of deep HI gas|
|Joanne Dawson||Macquarie University||Expert in gas and dust in the Milky Way|
|Caroline Foster||Univ. of Sydney||Galaxy dynamics and stellar populations expert|
|Baerbel Koribalski||CSIRO||Expert in HI gas observations and analysis|
|Jon Lawrence||Australian Astronomical Optics - Macquarie||Astronomical instrumentation expert|
|Richard McDermid||Macquarie University||Galaxy dynamics and stellar populations expert|
|Marc-Antoine Miville-Deschênes||Université Paris Saclay||Galactic ISM structures expert|
|Attila Popping||ICRAR / Univ. of Western Australia||lead of IMAGINE survey of deep HI gas|
|Christian Schwab||Macquarie University||Astronomical instrumentation and exoplanet expert|
|Daniel Zucker||Macquarie University||Satellite galaxy and stellar expert|