The Huntsman Telescope* is a wide field imager based on the successful Dragonfly Telescope concept.1 It consists of an array of co-aligned telephoto DSLR lenses with cooled CCD cameras. The ten 140 mm apertures have a combined collecting area equivalent to a 0.5 m class telescope but have lower stray light levels than a typical telescope of this size.1, 2 Its primary purpose is low surface brightness imaging of nearby galaxies, and it also observes exoplanet transits and other optical transients.

The Huntsman Telescope, located at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, is a system of ten telephoto Canon lenses designed for low surface brightness imaging in the Southern sky. Based upon the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, the refractive lens-based system provides an obstruction free optical path, which reduces the number of scattering surfaces and allows easier access to lower surface brightness levels. In this proceeding, we present an analysis of the impact of flat fielding uncertainty on the limiting low surface brightness levels. We show that a fairly standard set of flat-field data can be well-characterised to a $\sim0.1\%$ level. This corresponds to a 5-$\sigma$ lower limit of $\sim33$ magnitude per arcsecond$^2$, which means that flat fielding is not likely going to set Huntsman's low surface brightness limit. We also present early results of an exoplanet transient mode for Huntsman where all lenses work together to detect subtle variations in the luminosity of relatively bright $V=8-12$ magnitude stars. High-precision exoplanet imaging is ultimately limited by systematic uncertainties, so we anticipate multiple lenses will help to mitigate issues related to pixel-to-pixel and intra-pixel sensitivity variations. Our initial results show we can easily get $\sim0.4\%$ photometric precision with a single, defocused lens.

Black holes with a mass a million times the mass of our Sun or more-i.e., supermassive black holes-tend to reside in galactic centers. The mass of a supermassive black hole scales with the mass and stellar velocity dispersion of the bulge of the host galaxy. Thus, the central supermassive black hole in a galaxy appears to grow in conjunction with its host, but the physical mechanisms leading to such a coupling are not yet understood. Accreting supermassive black holes also comply with similar scaling relationships, which suggests that the accretion process plays an important role in the evolution of the host galaxy. We are exploring this question using a multiwavelength investigation of a sample of about 130 nearby southern galaxies that have accreting supermassive black holes. This study began as the Siding Spring Southern Seyfert Spectroscopic Snapshot Survey (S7), and we have obtained integral field spectroscopy for the central regions of all 130 of the galaxies. Radio-imaging follow-up work is ongoing, using the Giant Metre-Wave Radio Telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Several individual galaxies in our sample have been studied in detail as well. All of our data are intended for public release, with the first two releases already done. We present a brief status report of our investigation.

The most rapidly evolving regions of galaxies often display complex optical spectra with emission lines excited by massive stars, shocks and accretion on to supermassive black holes. Standard calibrations (such as for the star formation rate) cannot be applied to such mixed spectra. In this paper, we isolate the contributions of star formation, shock excitation and active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity to the emission line luminosities of individual spatially resolved regions across the central 3 x 3 kpc(2) region of the active barred spiral galaxy NGC 613. The star formation rate and AGN luminosity calculated from the decomposed emission line maps are in close agreement with independent estimates from data at other wavelengths. The star formation component traces the B-band stellar continuum emission, and the AGN component forms an ionization cone which is aligned with the nuclear radio jet. The optical line emission associated with shock excitation is cospatial with strong H-2 and [Fe II] emission and with regions of high ionized gas velocity dispersion (sigma greater than or similar to 100 km s(-1)). The shock component also traces the outer boundary of the AGN ionization cone and may therefore be produced by outflowing material interacting with the surrounding interstellar medium. Our decomposition method makes it possible to determine the properties of star formation, shock excitation and AGN activity from optical spectra, without contamination from other ionization mechanisms.