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Description
The MACHO Project is a collaboration between scientists at the Mt. Stromlo & Siding Spring Observatories, the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Santa Barbara, San Diego, & Berkeley campuses of the University of California, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The primary aim of the project is a search for dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way in the form of objects like brown dwarfs or planets also named MACHOs, for MAssive Compact Halo Objects. The signature of these MACHOs is the occasional amplification of the light from extragalactic stars by the gravitational lens effect. The amplification can be large, but events are extremely rare: it is necessary to monitor photometrically several million stars for a period of years in order to obtain a useful detection rate. The MACHO project is described by Alcock et al. (1992, in "Robotic Telescopes in the 1990s", A.V. Fillippenko Ed., ASP Conf. Series 34, p.193). A dedicated 1.27-m telescope at Mount Stromlo, Australia is used to obtain observations of the LMC year-round, using a camera imaging a field of view of 0.5 square degrees at prime focus. Photometric observations of the LMC fields are obtained in two bandpasses simultaneously, using a dichroic beamsplitter to direct the blue (440-590nm) and red (590-780nm) light onto 2x2 mosaics of 2048x2048 Loral CCDs; the 15um pixels map to 0.63arcsec on the sky. The photometric reduction methods are detailed in Alcock et al. (1996ApJ...461...84A).
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