While most of the very early robotic telescopes simply monitored known variable stars (e.g., Henry et al., 1995 Strassmeier et al., 1997), those that followed were designed to permit very rapid follow-up of gamma-ray bursts–e.g., ROTSE-III ( Akerlof et al., 2003), REM ( Antonelli et al., 2003), and BOOTES ( Castro-Tirado et al., 2004)-or search for exoplanets (e.g., with SuperWASP, Street et al., 2003), or to survey galaxies for supernovae (e.g., Filippenko et al., 2001 Lipunov et al., 2007). While there were lots of discussions and even a few robotic telescopes in the early 90 s (see, e.g., Perlmutter et al., 1992 Alcock et al., 1992), their number grew significantly in the decades thereafter. pyobs uses open standards and open software wherever possible and is itself freely available.Īt the turn of the millennium, a major change was starting to take place in observational astronomy: at first unnoticed by most astronomers, many new telescopes were refitted or newly built for remote or even fully autonomous observations. We are currently running pyobs successfully on three different types of telescopes, of which one is a siderostat for observing the Sun. The whole system is fully configurable and easily extendable. A remote-control interface, a “mastermind” for truly robotic operations as well as an interface to the Las Cumbres Observatory observation portal is included. Common functionality like focusing, acquisition, auto-guiding, sky-flat acquisition, and pipeline calibration are ready for use. It provides out-of-the-box support for many popular camera types while other hardware like telescopes, domes, and weather stations can easily be added via a thin abstraction layer to existing code. We present a Python-based framework for the complete operation of a robotic telescope observatory. 2TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Unterföhring, Germany.1Institute for Astrophysics and Geophysics, Göttingen University, Göttingen, Germany.Hessman 1 Sven Martens 1 Tilman Masur 1,2 Karl Royen 1 Sebastian Schäfer 1
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