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OMI --- The One Metre Initiative -- is a state-of-the-art
telescope design for a wide-field autonomous imaging facility
is set to become the highest performance telescope on Canadian
soil.
The One Meter Initiative (OMI) grew out of a passion for the
night sky and a deep interest in engineering. The idea of building
a world class telescope materialized in the fall of 2007. The
OMI will be located in North Frontenac, which is part the Madawaska
Highlands and has the darkest night skies in southern Canada,
where an horizon-horizon Milky Way cast a shadow and some 10,000
stars can be seen with the unaided eye! The OMI as been described
as "Very Impressive" by René Racine, Canada's
most prominent astronomer and "Extremely Impressive"
by Neil Turok, Scientific Director at the Perimeter Institute
of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. The ability to image very
deep, very wide and vary fast gives it a performance unmatched
by any one-metre class in the world. Indeed the OMI is capable
of out-performing much larger instruments including all Canadian
based instruments. The OMI will become a valuable asset to professional
astronomers.
The OMI has sufficient performance to make contributions across
many areas of astronomy and astrophysics. Such as cosmology where
its ability to image very wide and deep will permit the discovery
of a large number of high-z type 1a supernovae, a crucial measuring
candle. The search for Near-Earth-Asteroids is another area where
the OMI's large FOV, deep limiting magnitude and fast download
times could detect many small asteroids. Indeed the OMI is extremely
well suited to this task. Another very exiting area of research
is the detection of Earth-Sized planets orbiting nearby red-dwarf
stars which comprise some 80% of all the stars in the Galaxy.
The OMI with its large view and faint limiting magnitude could
detect many such objects using the transit method, whereas a planet
passes in front of its star, the slight dimming announcing its
presence.
The OMI will be the only professional Observatory in Canada with
time devoted to educational and outreach. Schools, colleges, students,
teachers, amateur astronomers and the general public will be able
to book queuing time on the instrument and make their own discoveries.
The imaging capabilities of the OMI will be unprecedented in its
ability to image very deep and very wide and thus offering the
observer a view of the universe not possible with any other telescope
in Canada.
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