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 Samuel Oschin Telescope (48-inch Schmidt 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.