Zwicky Transient Facility

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is an automated survey designed to find and report transients, which began surveying in 2018 using a custom camera on the Palomar 48 Inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. It is an improved version of earlier similar efforts on the same telescope, the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and the iPTF, the ZTF using an improved CCD which utilizes far more of the available field of view (FOV) of the telescope (a Schmidt camera with a 47 square-degree FOV). This newer CCD also allows data to be extracted with less time-overhead, i.e., a more efficient duty cycle, adding to its sensitivity.