AUTOMATED UNDERGRADUATE TELESCOPES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Stefan Mochnacki, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics

(assisted by Marc Castel, ROBOsky)

The 16-inch reflector on the roof of the McLennan Labs and the 12-inch Maksutov telescope at UTSC have been upgraded for automated, remote and robotic operation controlled via the Internet. This will allow students to carry out observations from home.

  • Dome at Scarborough
  • controller and servos
  • FLI camera on 12-inch
  • 16 inch telescope

    These telescopes are equipped with current technology and will be useful research tools in their own right as well as excellent undergraduate teaching instruments. The 40cm telescope can be accessed via:

  • WEBCAM view of 40cm Telescope (interactive)

  • WEB SERVER for 40cm Telescope Main Computer (Please e-mail me to get access information.)

  • WEB SERVER for 40cm Telescope Skyguide computer

    As an example, see a spectrum of Saturn and an image of Saturn through the slit-viewer CCD.

  • WEBCAM view of 30cm Telescope at UTSC.

  • Making the Sky Inviting: The Project to Modernise the Undergraduate Observatories of the University of Toronto (original 2001 proposal, in PDF).

    Some of the equipment we have purchased can be seen at:

  • Astrometric's SkyWalker Telescope Motor and Accessory Controller. A view of our system is here.

  • Large-format CCD camera for imaging with 30cm telescope.

  • SBIG Self-Guiding Spectrograph for 40cm telescope.

  • SBIG ST-7E CCD Camera for Spectrograph.

  • ACP-2 Astronomer's Control Program and PinPoint Astrometric Engine software (including Web server).

  • The Sky astronomy software and TPoint Windows Telescope Pointing Analysis Software. TPOINT can be further studied at Pat Wallace's TPOINT site , while the correction terms are desribed at his page on pointing corrections and in a 1977 ESO conference .

  • MaxIm DL/CCD Image Processing and Camera Control software.

    In the winter of 2001, I gave a talk on small robotic telescopes. On February 15, Shenton Chew and I visited Royal Military College, Kingston, and saw this Celestron 14 with a 512x512 AP-7 CCD . The mount is a Paramount GT-1100 . The software is Windows-based and sold by Software Bisque . Here's RMC's Mike Earl in the dome at RMC. It is part of the CASTOR project.

    Queen's University have recently installed a Torus Technologies CC04 telescope, with the same sensitive back-illuminated SITe-chip equipped Apogee AP-7 camera as used by RMC. This system is Linux-based, using Talon software. This approach was developed at the University of Iowa .

    A 16-inch B&C like ours was roboticized in 1989 at University of Indiana, and has yielded many results. Many such telescopes have been upgraded since.

    Other concepts we considered include the Hungarian Automated Telescope (HAT) and the Polish All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) compact mounts , and the Centurion 18 0.45 cm specialised imaging telescope for CCD chips with small (under 10 micron) pixels, such as our existing SBIG ST-8 detector. An ASAS or HAT unit would be inexpensive to house .