24-eyed telescope takes full-sky movies every night
Wide-eyed array in Chile scopes changes in the southern sky
HONOLULU — The Evryscope might look like an upside down colander repurposed as a set piece for Star Trek. But its actual purpose is to make a movie of the entire southern sky.
“People think it looks strange,” says Nicholas Law, an astrophysicist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, “but it’s doing what it’s designed to do.”
Because a typical telescope has a narrow range of view, using one is like studying the universe through a drinking straw. But every two minutes the Chile-based Evryscope, with 24 telescopes working as one, images a patch of sky so wide it would take 32,000 full moons to cover it.