NSF Award
0205397
AST-0204908<br/>Paczynski<br/><br/>The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) has undergone a major upgrade from a 2000 x 2000 CCD camera (OGLE-II) to a mosaic 8000 x 8000 CCD camera (OGLE-III). The new system<br/>became operational in the summer 2001, and it is expected to be fully streamlined, with a real time detection of microlensing events, by 2002. The 1.3 meter OGLE telescope is located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. <br/><br/>With the OGLE-II, Dr. Paczynski and his colleagues were detecting about 170 microlensing events per year. With the OGLE-III and new software, they expect to detect up to 1,000 events per year. This high rate virtually guarantees a detection of Jupiter mass planets and stellar mass black<br/>holes. The same data will be searched for planetary transits. <br/><br/>Almost all OGLE-II data (1997-2000) are now available on WWW and on DAT, in a highly<br/>compressed format: 1 Terra Byte of original CCD images has been reduced to less than 10 GB.<br/>The archive includes high signal-to-noise images of about 16 square degrees in the Galactic Bulge, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the photometry of about 30 million non-variable stars. The group expects to make the photometry of about one million variable stars detected by OGLE-III available on-line, first within 24 hours, and some time later within 10 minutes of taking CCD images. OGLE data will be used to study the structure of our Galaxy, the structure of the LMC and SMC, as well as to determine ever more accurate distance scale.<br/><br/>******
