Panoramic SETI: on-sky results from prototype telescopes and instrumental design

Abstract

The Panoramic SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiment (PANOSETI) aims to detect and quantify optical transients from nanosecond to second precision over a large field-of-view ($\sim$4,450 square-degrees). To meet these challenging timing and wide-field requirements, the PANOSETI experiment will use two assemblies of $\sim$45 telescopes to reject spurious signals by coincidence detection, each one comprising custom-made fast photon-counting hardware combined with ($f/1.32$) focusing optics. Preliminary on-sky results from pairs of PANOSETI prototype telescopes (100 sq.deg.) are presented in terms of instrument performance and false alarm rates. We found that a separation of $>$1 km between telescopes surveying the same field-of-view significantly reduces the number of false positives due to nearby sources (e.g., Cherenkov showers) in comparison to a side-by-side configuration of telescopes. Design considerations on the all-sky PANOSETI instrument and expected field-of-views are reported.