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A satellite image showing the location of the three Colibri telescopes (stars) and the control center (CC). Taken from Mazur et al. (2022).
A view of an Elginfield after sunset. Photo credit: Stan Metchev.
A Colibri telescope as seen at night. Photo credit: Dale Armstrong.
What is Colibri?
What is Colibri?
Colibri is a research program at Western University (Canada) dedicated to discovering and characterizing small bodies in the outer Solar System—and to time-domain optical astronomy more broadly—by measuring millisecond-scale dips in starlight (stellar occultations).
Located at Elginfield Observatory in Granton, Ontario, three telescopes spaced 160 m apart observe the same dense star fields at high frame rates. This setup allows us to detect the fleeting shadows of small Kuiper Belt / Trans-Neptunian Objects — and also supports ultra-precise exoplanet transit and high-speed photometry studies.
Principal Investigator: Prof. Stanimir Metchev (Western University and the Institute for Earth & Space Exploration). Colibri is developed/maintained with contributions from students, engineers, and collaborators across Canada and abroad.
Want the specifics?
Learn more about Colibri Instrumentation
Why COLIBRI?
Why COLIBRI?
Catch what most telescopes miss.
Tiny objects beyond Neptune block a star for only a few tenths of a second. Colibri records the sky fast enough to see those brief dips clearly—then double-checks them with more than one telescope.Three eyes on the same stars.
Our telescopes watch the same field from different spots on site. If all three see the same dip at the same moment, it’s real. If not, it’s likely the atmosphere or noise. That simple idea dramatically cuts false positives.
Built for nightly discovery.
COLIBRI runs as an automated survey: observe → reject false positives → flag candidates for follow-up the next day. You get high-cadence data and fast turnaround without a mountain of manual work.More than KBOs.
While Colibri's main goal is to monitor the outer Solar System, the same fast, precise light curves can theoretically resolve exoplanet transits and other short-timescale events.
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