Developments at Palomar S. R. Kulkarni California Institute of Technology

Telescopes at Palomar Zwicky’s 18-inch (not in use) Hale 200-inch Oschin 48-inch Schmidt 60-inch 20-inch dome: 99-mm copy of STARE (Charbonneau) 24-inch telescope (Mike Brown; Fall)

P200: Large Format Camera Six 2K by 4K Site thinned CCDs Prime focus with Wynne corrector FOV = 25 by 24 arcmin built by M. Metzger

P200: Wide Field IR Camera Prime Focus NIR camera 2K by 2K Hawaii-II FOV = 8.7 arcmin by 8.7 arcmin led by S. Eikneberry, Cornell

Pharo + AO 1K by 1K Hawaii or arcsec/pixel Grism (spectral resolution of 1500) Coronagraphic stop Guide star V=11 in reasonable seeing; can push to V=13.5 in good seeing led by R. Dekany (JPL), T.Hayward(Cornell)

QUEST 112 CCDs, 600 by 2400 pixels FOV = 4.6 deg by 3.6 deg (10 sq degree effective area) Drift scan or Point & Shoot led by C. Baltay (Yale)

Projects with Quest Yale-Indiana, 40% of time Quasar variability survey Intermediate redshift SN JPL, 40% of time Near-earth asteroids Caltech, 20% of time KBOs (Quahar and Plutos) High redshift quasars

P60: Dedicated for Transient Object Astronomy Telescope now fully automated New CCD detector (Harrison) Software pipeline (Fox and IPAC) led by S. Kulkarni & F. Harrison

P60 now in routine operation 20% of time for Caltech community (non TOO observations; que scheduled) 10% of time for IPAC (non TOO observations; que scheduled) 70% of time for GRB project => Launch of Swift (September 2004)

Sleuth (Stare): Planet Search Sleuth is patterned after T. Brown’s successful Stare project (HD fame) In routine operation Many false positives being detected (10 mag) led by D. Charbonneau

Palomar Testbed Interferometer 100-m baseline, 40-cm siderostats H, K bands Highlights: M dwarf diameter determination Pulsations of Cepheid variable Herbig Ae/Be star

Distance to Pleiades via Atlas X-P Pan, M. Shao & S. Kulkarni (Nature, negotiating with Editor) Pleiades is a gold standard for intermediate mass stars, brown dwarfs and Cepheid distance scale Hipparcos team published distance to Pleiades D = 118 +/- 4 pc Traditional distance (color-mag diagram) D = 131 +/- 3 pc Hipparcos result generated “lively” controversy.

Orbit of Atlas (Mark III & PTI) P(orbit)= 291day a = 13 mas e = Inclination=108d

Distance via Kepler’s 3rd law A 3 = d 3 a 3 = (m 1 +m 2 )P 2

Search for Planets in Binary Stars Lane and Mutterspaugh have demonstrated very narrow angle astrometry with PTI (fringe scanning) We are starting a 3-yr survey to search astrometrically for planets in speckle binaries Konacki has successfully achieved 10 m/s RV for binary stars with HIRES