The Chinese Ground Follow-up Telescope (CGFT) is located at Jilin observatory (Longitude: 126d 19m 49.66s Latitude. : 43d 49m 27.76s). It has aperture of 1.2 meters with a limiting magnitude of r_AB=19 in 100 second exposures. Two sets of instruments are mounted at the Cassegrain focus and primary focus, respectively. The Cassegrain-focus instrument, a three-channel camera, can take exposures simultaneously in SDSS g, r and i bands with sky coverage of 21’x21′. The primary-focus camera has 4kx4k pixels corresponding to 1.5 x 1.5 deg**2 sky coverage. The second mirror can be moved manually to switch focus between the primary and the Cassegrain.
Thanks to its large FOV and multiple bands of simulatenous photometry, CGFT is a telescope that can quickly (less than one minute) and automatically respond to any target of opportunity observation to search for the optical counterpart of gamma-ray bursts, neutrinos and gravitational-wave events in tiling survey mode. An online data processing of the observations is under development to report any interesting transients.
CGFT will join the french-chinese project SVOM by 2021.
Partners
The telescope is founded by Changchun Observatory National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Science
Team
Chao Wu (NAOC), Xiaomeng Lu (NAOC), Mo Zhang(NAOC), Zhenwei Li (CONAOC), Zhe Kang(CONAOC)