Sciences with the 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST)

Understand

The Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is a dedicated photometric surveying facility being built jointly by the University of Science and Technology of China and the Purple Mountain Observatory.

• It is equipped with a 2.5-meter diameter primary mirror, an active optics system, and a mosaic CCD camera with 0.73 gigapixels on the primary focal plane for high-quality image capture over an FOV of 6.5-square-degree.
• It is anticipated that WFST will be set up at the Lenghu site in the summer of 2023 and begin to observe the northern sky in four optical bands (u, g, r, and i) with a range of cadences, from hourly/daily in the Deep High-Cadence Survey (DHS) program to semiweekly in the Wide-Field Survey (WFS) program, three months later.
• During a photometric night, a nominal 30 s exposure in the WFS program will reach a depth of 22.27, 23.32, 22.84, and 22.31 (AB magnitudes) in these four bands, respectively, allowing for the detection of a tremendous amount of transients in the low-z universe and a systematic investigation of the variability of Galactic and extragalactic objects.