OPA! The Original PolyOculus Array: A status update

The PolyOculus technology, developed by CREOL's Astrophonics group, creates a large-area-equivalent telescope using fiber optics and a photonic lantern to link several semi-autonomous, small, inexpensive, commercial-off-the-shelf telescopes. The Original PolyOculus Array, OPA, will use seven, Celestron 11" telescopes with iOptron centralbalanced equatorial mounts (CEM 70) to create a similar to 0.75m equivalent optical telescope for spectroscopic follow up observations of astronomical events. This telescope array will include 7 acquisition and guiding systems (one per telescope) to appropriately center and finely focus objects in the telescopes' field of view along with an atmospheric dispersion corrector for each unit. That light will then be sent through single, multimode, optical fibers (one fiber per telescope) and to a photonic lantern where the light from all seven telescopes will be combined then sent to a spectrograph. The photonic lantern has demonstrated over 91% efficiency in combined optical light. The Original PolyOculus Array will be commissioned and operated at Mount Laguna Observatory in southern California. OPA will be the prototype to an eventual, more numerous PolyOculus driven array and other future PolyOculus arrays with different applications.