Observations of Microlensing Events and Gamma Ray Bursts from New Zealand

The MOA Project is a Japan-New Zealand collaboration conducting observations of microlensing events Galactic Bulge and the Magellanic Clouds. MOA currently employs a 24 Mega-pixels CCD mosaic camera.
A particularly exciting application of microlensing observations is search for extra-solar planets. The MOA strategy for extra-solar planet hunting will be described along with an example of a planetary detection by microlensing. Observations with large CCD cameras have wider ranging applications in time critical astrophysics
including searches for optical counterparts of gammay ray bursts. The efforts of MOA in this direction will also be described.