A continuous watch of the northern sky above 40 TeV with the CYGNUS array

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The aim of the project has been to continuously monitor the northern sky for transient high-energy gamma-ray emission from astrophysical sources. Potential objects of such emission include gamma-ray bursts and flares from active galaxies. At the start of this project, the CYGNUS extensive air shower array was used for the monitoring; CYGNUS has an energy threshold of {approximately}40 TeV. In August, 1996, the CYGNUS data-acquisition computer suffered a fatal hardware problem so data-taking with the array ended. The Milagrito detector, which is much more sensitive than CYGNUS, started taking data in February 1997 and has continued the sky monitoring. The authors are presently honing reconstruction algorithms for Milagrito. When this is complete, the data taken since February will be analyzed for transient emission