Re: ConCams

[<aah@nofs.navy.mil>]

Having *two* simultaneous exposures, as done with the Mark IV,
is much more convincing when it comes to transient events.
The concam pixels are very large, and I would bet that confusion
with satellite glints and cosmic rays must be a real problem.
In addition, the fisheye has very little aperture, and the
limiting magnitude is not much better than the human eye.
  Finding and confirming optical flashes is a hard project.
You want to go deep, yet cover a large area.  Then software to
pick out those events that occur in two cameras, have a stellar
profile, yet don't belong to any known astronomical object, is complex.
Going the other way -- knowing a transitory event should have
occurred in some specific location in the sky at some specific
time -- is possible, and we have done that on several GRB events,
both with ConCam and with StarDial.  That is probably one reason
why we should keep Mark IV images around even after data extraction.
Arne