The WASP Project and the SuperWASP Cameras

Abstract

The SuperWASP cameras are wide- field imaging systems at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, and at the Sutherland Station of the South African Astronomical Observatory. Each instrument has a field of view of some 482 deg(2) with an angular scale of 13".7 pixel(-1), and is capable of delivering photometry with accuracy better than 1% for objects having. V similar to 7.0 -11.5. Lower quality data for objects brighter than are stored in the project archive. The systems, while designed to monitor fields with high cadence, are capable of surveying the entire visible sky every 40 minutes. Depending on the observational strategy, the data rate can be up to 100 Gbytes per night. We have produced a robust, largely automatic reduction pipeline and advanced archive, which are used to serve the data products to the consortium members. The main science aim of these systems is to search for bright transiting exoplanet systems suitable for spectroscopic follow- up observations. The first 6 month season of SuperWASP-North observations produced light curves of similar to 6.7 million objects with 12.9 billion data points.