The Imaging Sky-Probe is a piggy-back instrument on the PS1 telescope. It consists of a CCD detector, 500mm commercial lens and filter wheel. It operates simultaneously with the PS1 camera
The Pan-STARRS all-sky camera captures 180 degree views of the sky through a fish-eye lens almost nightly. As all-sky cameras go, this instrument is quite high resolution with a pixel scale of 5 arcminutes.
The Earth's atmosphere is generally transparent at optical wavelengths, but absorption lines produced by water vapor and OH can be a nuisance to astronomical observers. We can measure the attenuation of the atmosphere with wide-area cameras such as the Sky-Probe and All-Sky Cam and with computer modeling we can reconstruct the transmission function at any wavelength. This is important for precisely understanding the spectral energy distribution of astronomical sources from observations through broad-band filters.