Small+and+Robotic+Telescopes


 * Small and Robotic Telescopes in the Era of Massive Time-Domain Surveys**

Michael Bode, //Liverpool John Moores University// Tom Vestrand, //Los Alamos National Laboratory//

We have entered an era in Time Domain astronomy wherein the detected rate of explosive transients and important ephemeral states in persistent objects threatens to overwhelm the World's supply of traditional follow-up telescopes. As new, comprehensive, time domain surveys become operational and wide-field multi-messenger observatories come on-line, this problem will become more acute. The goal of this workshop is to foster discussion about how autonomous robotic telescopes and small aperture conventional telescopes can be employed in the most effective ways to help deal with the coming deluge of scientifically interesting follow-up opportunities. Discussion topics will include the role of event brokers, automated event triage, establishment of cooperative global telescope networks, and real-time coordination of observations at geographically diverse sites. It will therefore include brief overviews of the current diverse landscape of telescopes and their interactions, and also consider planned and potential new facilities and operating models.

Iain Steele will introduce the session with a short talk on the current lanscape, which also may include a contribution from Arne Henden on the AAVSO network. A short talk on networks will then be given by Tom Vestrand.

__RE: MoU documents__

I was asked by the organisers of this session to upload a copy of the memorandum of understanding between the LOFAR transients key project, the LIGO scientific collaboration, and the Virgo scientific collaboration. Here it is:



This MoU is probably pretty typical. It deals with issues of how data is shared, issues of publications procedures, of author lists, of defining the collaborations between which the MoU applies, and of the duration of the MoU - ie - it has an end date.

I hope the discussion we had today promotes the idea of a consortium of operators of robotic telescopes; this would make the goal of optical follow up of LSC/Virgo alerts much closer. Cheers, Ed Daw, e.daw@shef.ac.uk