What is CLIC?
CLIC is the Berkeley Cloud Locating Infrared Camera. The hope is that CLIC will be a fully automated infrared camera capable of monitoring the entire sky at 10 μ in search of clouds.
CLIC will constantly update an online list of clouds. It will post all-sky images and information about the positions and fluxes of any clouds it detects. This has several applications, the most exciting of which is telescope automation. Rather than limiting automated telescopes to on/off cloud avoidance capabilities, CLIC will allow telescopes to point "between the clouds."
CLIC will also offer rough cloud flux measurements. It may be possible to do science with these measurements and attempt to better understand the impact of mild cloud obscuration on photometry.
CLIC will be paired with PAIRITEL and will complement the telescope's queue-scheduled observing model.
Who's doing this?
CLIC is Professor Joshua Bloom's brainchild and is being designed and put together by Onsi Fakhouri, a mildly experienced second-year graduate student at the Berkeley Astronomy Department.Milestones
The following is a list of the milestones we've accomplished so far. For a more detailed progress list, and for an idea of where CLIC goes from here, visit the progress page.
| July 1st | CLIC website is now up and running! |
| June 29th | Final (for now) reflector design is in. Submitted the CAD files to our manufacturer! |
| June 16th | Finished writing MirRay. Added the secondary reflector to our design. This brings us quite close to the final design. |
| June 4th | Placed the order for the camera! |
| May 30th | Started writing MirRay, the 3D raytracer I'll be using to design the mirror and wrap my head around the reflector. |
| May 19th | Placed the order for the computer that will control the camera (nothing fancy, a simple linux box). |
| May 18th | Met with a potential infrared camera supplier. Looks like we've found what we're looking for! |