Milestone for technology development: "First Light" for ORCA-TWIN

Our new ORCA quest camera on the 1.23 m telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory in southern Spain has been put into service! This is a decisive step for the time domain Astronomy and technology development here in Görlitz. With a new camera based on a silicon CMOS chip, the Centre for Technology Development has achieved an important intermediate goal. In the development phase of the DZA, it was planned to enter the technology development with pilot projects at Alstom after the establishment of a temporary laboratory building.

We are thus consistently continuing our research and development. A first pilot project on detector technology, which researches new materials and camera systems, is being promoted in cooperation with the Technical University of Dresden and the Fraunhofer IPMS. In doing so, we use the excellent semiconductor expertise in Saxony and address the need for novel detectors for temporally variable objects in the cosmos.

Our team around Martin M. Roth, Stella Vjesnica and Paško Roje, together with Alex Brown (University of Hamburg), achieved their "First Light" at the ORCA TWIN in a four-day observation campaign. Despite extremely adverse conditions such as full moon and Calima (Saharan sandwind), we were able to get impressive results from the sky: spectacular images of the Planetary Nebula M57, a first scientifically interesting time series of the cover-changing double star NN Serpentis and a light curve of the ultra-compact hot sub-dwarf twin star ZTF J2130+4420 – a potential source of gravitational waves. The results are comparable to those of much larger telescopes, despite adverse observation conditions!

Wir sind begeistert von diesen Erfolgen und blicken gespannt auf die kommenden wissenschaftlichen Projekte mit unseren Partnern.

Danke ans Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), die Universität Potsdam, das CAHA, das Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) und die Universität Hamburg.