Julian Krause München

The MAGIC Telescopes (pdf)

The MAGIC Telescopes are with their 17m diameter reflectors the two biggest operating Cherenkov Telescopes. They are located at the Roque de los Muchachos on the Canary Island La Palma. In the end of 2009 MAGIC II (the second Telescope being an improved twin of MAGIC I) started to fully operate. Now MAGIC benefits from the stereo observation mode yielding a better background suppression and therefore has a higher sensitivity. MAGIC scans the universe for VHE (E > 50 GeV) gamma-ray sources to study energetic processes of the most violent environments in the universe. Key topics are the study of the gamma-ray emission of supernova remnants, binary systems, active galactic nuclei and pulsars. Beside the study of the sources itself VHE-gamma astronomy can be used to search for the origin of cosmic rays or to study the extragalactic background light. I will report on the status of the experiment and my personal contribution to it.