"Pi of the Sky Plus" - The evolution of the "Pi of the Sky" project

Nowadays research Astronomy concentrates on two extremely important areas: the evolution of the Universe at large scales (e.g. observational lessons learned from studying formation and evolution of galaxies) and astrophysics of processes occurring in strong gravitational fields (e.g. strongly curved space-time geometry and astrophysics of dense and compact objects).
The main task of modern Cosmology is to understand the evolution of the Uni-verse and its content. Strong gravitational fields and non-trivial space-time geome-tries can be found in vicinity of compact and dense objects. Their violent creation and decay are very often accompanied by strong emission of relativistic particles, photons, neutrinos and gravitational waves. Perhaps one of the most significant examples is the naked eye Gamma-Ray Burst GRB080319B (Racusin et al. 2008). Its observations across a wide band of electromagnetic spectrum provided unique data about phenomena occurring when a massive star collapses to a black hole. The key factor in observations of fast transients of cosmological origin is the prompt reaction of robotic telescopes capable of high time resolution observations. The required very short reaction time and high pointing precision set a high threshold on construction of such a detector. The design and construction of the new, fast parallactic mount for the Pi of the Sky experiment will be presented.

Author: Marcin Zaremba
Conference: Title