The Huntsman Telescope: lessons learned from building an autonomous telescope from COTS components

Abstract

The Huntsman Telescope* is a wide field imager based on the successful Dragonfly Telescope concept.1 It consists of an array of co-aligned telephoto DSLR lenses with cooled CCD cameras. The ten 140 mm apertures have a combined collecting area equivalent to a 0.5 m class telescope but have lower stray light levels than a typical telescope of this size.1, 2 Its primary purpose is low surface brightness imaging of nearby galaxies, and it also observes exoplanet transits and other optical transients.