Now... Saturday afternoon, after resting for more than 8 hours, I can post something more useful and make the scratch from last night turn into a poster.
I came to CTIO Headquarters on Friday afernoon and met Stephen Heathcote (big boss here) and Kepler Oliveira, a brazilian friend and a pretty good astronomer. I sat around, worked on my talk and stayed for a remote observation session at SOAR telescope last night. What a program!!! They were following the star HD221226, with three 20 min. exposure, then a calibration star was targeted and back to the same object again.
Then I left to work on my Monday morning talk on the SZ effect and, after 3h00 AM I went "home".
What is amazing about it? The most interesting thing is that, through a teleconference and 3 or 4 internet connections to SOAR, people at La Serena (CTIO Headquarters), Cerro Pachon (SOAR site) and University of Michigan could simultaneously follow - and even control - the observations. It was just not possible 5 years ago. Now, we can chat in real time and control the telescopes from the other side of the Earth!!!
Well, we still need the telescope operators for safety and fine tuning of the telescope parameters, but the science part can all be done remotely. As I was telling Alexandre Oliveira, a Brazilian resident astronomer at CTIO, "it is not robotic yet, but it is - quite sucessfully - really remote".
Now, you all have a good Saturday. I am finishing the details of my talk and tomorrow I will drive to Cerro Pachon and Cerro Tololo. Just wait great pictures soon.
Hasta la vista.
Robotic telescopes are quite complicated :-))
ResponderExcluirActually it's very confortable to use this queue/service mode as it exists in Gemini and other telescopes.
On the other hand the thing isn't done "the way you want", what basically means some time to understand what was really made and sometimes you just get no data, because it was not taken in the proper way.
A remote observation is even more risky in that sence! As large telescopes and new instruments also get more and more complicated a fully robotic observations will be dificult in my opinion. On the other hand, simple telescopes can be really robotic, as the one at UFSC or the MONET.
The most probable and interesting way, I'd say, would be the "remote observation", now possible by the very fast internet connections you comment about. The PI is not there physically, but he's still monitoring his observations and "driving" them to the way he wants them.