In optical astronomy, technological forces are similarly favoring LNSD over SNLD for many goals. Optical sensors (CMOS) with very low read noise are now available at low cost. The amateur community has a huge appetite for low-cost but high performance telescopes, mounts, low noise detectors and sophisticated imaging data reduction tools. The deepest narrow band images are now being produced by amateur astronomers, thanks to, in addition to the above advances, low cost high-performance narrow band (3-nm brick wall) filters. The annual sales of the amateur community is now estimated to be $350M.
Time domain astronomy (TDA) is now a major force in optical astronomy. In fact, it appears that there is an over abundance of optical TDA imaging surveys. The real bottleneck is follow up, specifically spectroscopic follow up.
The primary workhorse for spectroscopic follow up is conventional spectrographs on moderate to large telescopes (for example, X-Shooter at VLT, NPGS on P200). There is a great opportunity to re-purpose existing 2-m to 3-m telescopes for TDA followup (for example, SEDM on P60, SOX on the 3.6-m NTT). Failing that new telescopes can be built for this purpose. Regardless, current spectrographs follow a conventional path (collimator, disperser, camera lens, detector). Conventional Spectrometers are not cheap. Reducing the cost of spectrographs is clearly of great value.
Separately, AO is extremely helpful for small telescopes, and as shown by Robo-AO, is affordable. Particularly for spectroscopy AO can lead to smaller fiber beams and so provide higher spectral resolution or more compact spectrographs. Finally, there has been very little discussion of amplitude interferometry based on fibers as opposed to free space propagation (cf. CHARA).
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