PESSTO

PESSTO is the "Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects" using the ESO New Technology Telescope and the EFOSC2 (optical) and SOFI (NIR) spectrographs. It is one of two currently running public spectroscopic surveys at ESO... The construction of wide-field optical telescopes equipped with digital cameras with fields of view between 5-10 square degrees means that nearly the entire sky could be repeatedly surveyed in less than a month. These synoptic surveys are discovering new classes of transients that challenge our ideas of the physics of the explosions. We are beginning to see a diversity in the transient Universe that very likely depends on the progenitor stellar mass, metallicity, binarity and rotation... We aim to provide 150 supernovae (or unusual optical transients) with full spectroscopic time series coverage (around 10 epochs of spectra)