GOTTA prototype telescope and preliminary results from the pilot survey

Abstract

The Global Open Transient Telescope Array (GOTTA), also referred to as SiTian, is an ambitious project to build a distributed network of wide-field 1m class telescopes. Its goal is to survey the entire accessible optical sky with a cadence of 30 minutes and three colors to a 5σ depth of ∼21.5 mag. This capability will revolutionize the study of transients by catching rare fast-evolving events and by generating densely sampled, high-accuracy light curves for variable stars and Solar System objects. Over the past several years, we have designed, built, and commissioned a prototype telescope, which a Ring Schmidt system, and conducted a six-month pilot survey that produced hundreds of hours of calibrated science data. We introduce the prototype and detector development, the commissioning performance, and the multi-layer data reduction pipelines. A series of papers will be published in a special issue of Research on Astronomy and Astrophysics. The prototype effort validates the full hardware, software, and operational model and paves the way for construction of the full GOTTA array across multiple sites in China and overseas.