The dawn of wide-field time domain astronomy in the infrared with Palomar Gattini-IR

Palomar Gattini-IR is a new wide-field near-infrared time domain survey operating from Palomar observatory in California. Using a 30 cm telescope mounted with a 2K X 2K detector, Gattini-IR achieves a field of view of 25 square degrees with a pixel scale of 8.7 arcsec. In this talk, I will present the system design, survey operations and data processing system of Palomar Gattini-IR. With a field of view 40 times larger than any other existing near infrared imager, Gattini-IR is performing the first un-targeted, all-sky census of the dynamic infrared sky to a depth of 16 AB mag and cadence of 1 - 2 nights. I will discuss first results from a broad range of infrared-bright time domain phenomena being systematically characterized with the survey — ranging from discovery of highly reddened classical novae in the Galactic plane, obscured outbursts from Young Stellar Objects, variability in dust obscured Galactic stars, reddened microlensing events in the Galactic plane and infrared bright supernovae in nearby galaxies. I will present our constraints on the second-timescale near-infrared flaring of the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 using a novel fast readout mode for the infrared detector.