The search for optical transients with the explosive transient camera

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Abstract
For the past 2.5 years, the Explosive Transient Camera (ETC), located on the summit ridge of Kitt Peak, has been conducting an automated wide‐field sky search for optical transients. The ETC’s CCD cameras, with a total field‐of‐view of 0.75 steradians, are capable of detecting an optical transient as faint as V=10. To date, the ETC has surveyed over 600 steradian‐hours of the night sky between −15° and +45° declination. These observations have resulted in the detection of over 100,000 optical flashes: most, if not all, of these flashes were created by known terrestrial sources, such as moonlit clouds and artificial Earth satellites. After further analysis roughly 500 of these events remain unidentified: the locations and times of a subset of these events remain unidentified: the locations and times of a subset of these events are presently being compared with the locations of known satellites, to test the hypothesis that all of these events were created by satellites.

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