Australia’s Macquarie University with support from Canon Australia has today unveiled the Huntsman Telescope. This is a novel telescope concept designed to ‘hunt’ for and study ultra-faint galaxies and astronomical objects in the Southern Sky.
The Huntsman Telescope comprises an array of 10 commercially available Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS II super-telephoto lenses, that are attached to 10 Canon R5 mirrorless cameras. The Huntsman Telescope is the only telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
Located at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, NSW, the Huntsman Telescope will perform deep southern sky surveys to provide researchers with a unique understanding of galaxy formation and evolution; how galaxies form, how they grow, how they engage with structures that surround them, and what happens when galaxies collide. This information could help determine the fate of the Milky Way with Scientists theorizing that our Galaxy is on course for a head-on collision with the Andromeda Galaxy in around 4.5 billion years.
Huntsman will help answer some outstanding questions in modern astrophysics research:
The Huntsman Telescope was inspired by the innovative Dragonfly Telephoto Array, based in the United States.
The team chose to use Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 L lenses because of their anti-reflection properties, owing to one of the first applications of Canon’s patented nano-fabricated coatings with sub-wavelength structures on optical glasses. The coated lens array contrasts to a conventional mirror telescope, whose imperfectly polished surface can introduce subtle errors that ruin faint, extended structures surrounding galaxies
Each lens in the array is equipped with a single monolithic wide-field detector covering six square degrees. With multiple redundant lines of sight, the Huntsman is able to achieve extremely accurate modeling of the night sky emission and produce ultra-clear renderings of our universe.
The Huntsman Telescope project is a jointly-led project from Macquarie University School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and the Australian Astronomical Optics Macquarie, both within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Macquarie University. The project is supported financially by a Discovery Project awarded through the Australian Research Council.
The Huntsman Telescope will be open to the public on 1 October 2022, as part of the annual StarFest.
Matthew Allard is a multi-award-winning, ACS accredited freelance Director of Photography with 30 years' experience working in more than 50 countries around the world. He is the Editor of Newsshooter.com and has been writing on the site since 2010. Matthew has won 43 ACS Awards, including four prestigious Golden Tripods. In 2016 he won the Award for Best Cinematography at the 21st Asian Television Awards. Matthew is available to hire as a DP in Japan or for work anywhere else in the world.
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