An NOAO Long Term Survey with the MOSAIC Imager on the Blanco 4 meter telescope

We have undertaken a project to monitor tens of millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a neighboring galaxy, to search for the distinctive brightening of stars that is the signature of gravitational microlensing. This project is a successor to the MACHO Project which ran for a decade at the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Australia.

Our goal is to ascertain the nature of the mysterious population of objects that is responsible for producing the observed excess of microlensing events in the LMC.  An non-technical description (PDF) of the project is available here.

A copy of our original NOAO observing proposal (PostScript) is accessible as well.

2004 alerts

MICROLENSING ALERT Page

The SuperMacho Team = Who "we" are!

Group pages (Restricted Acces) User name: Password:

This image shows the layout of our fields across the bar and disk of the LMC. Our primary (green) and secondary (red) field centers are shown as boxes with the field of view of the MOSAIC imager. We cover the 52 primary fields each half night we observe, and as many of the secondary fields as sky brightness allows. The exposure times are optimized to maximize the number of observed stars per half night.

A listing of field centers and default exposure times is available here.

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SN 1987A: light echoes made visible by difference image subtraction

LMC as seen by the CTIO 4m + MOSAIC camera.

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An Extended LMC astrometric catalog, by field (soon).

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Focus settings Table (PostScript)

Observing Procedures (PostScript)

Excel file for optimization of exposure times, accompanying documentation.

MACHO project database access

Powerpoint talk on reduction pipeline (MS PPT)

SM fields with line numbers

Publications, Posters, and Talks (PPTs!)

• Invited Talk at the AAS January 2003: "SuperMacho and Supernoave: Astrophysics in the Time Domain" (C. Stubbs) - abstract,talk (powerpoint)
• Poster at the AAS January 2003: "The SuperMacho Project: An LMC Microlensing Search using the Blanco 4m telescope and the MOSAIC Imager" (C. Stubbs et al.) - abstract,poster
• Poster at the AAS January 2003: "The SuperMacho+SuperNova Survey Database Design: Supporting Time Domain Analysis of GB to TB Astronomical Datasets" (R. Hiriart et al.) abstract, poster
• Poster at the AAS January 2003: "A Common Pipeline for Real-time Detection of Optical Transients via Frame Subtraction for LONEOS, SDSS, SuperMACHO and ESSENCE" (A. Miceli et al.) - abstract,poster (powerpoint)
• Powerpoint talk on reduction pipeline (MS PPT)

Last updated: January 03, 2005 by C. Aguilera