Robotic Astronomy

No, this isn’t what you do once you’ve fallen asleep and your body goes on autopilot….

I recently caved in and bought a new laptop with Windows XP. I despise Microsoft and now have to deal with self-loathing for my collapse. But this allowed me to also jump to my main goal which is to automate some of the telescope setup for taking real science data. Of course, courtesy of President Bush, I shortly thereafter lost an hour of my evening telescope time due to the new daylight savings time rules.

In any event, I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with ACP (see http://acp4.dc3.com/index2.html) which is, in spite of being an "observatory" control program also offers a lot to mobile observers like me. Now, as soon as I get the hang of actually using it I hope to be able to start doing some regular variable star measurements.

What with the weather here in New York, and the completely mobile setup and crappy light pollution of New York City, I also plopped down my money for time at Rent-A-Scope (http://www.global-rent-a-scope.com/) and have made my first good quality measurement of a cataclysmic variable (you can start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_variable_star or do a Google search for more information on these fascinating objects).

The star in question goes by the lovely (ahem) name of DV UMa (DV Ursa Majoris which you old-school Latin types will recognize a belonging to Ursa Major). DV UMa normally sits around magnitude 19 but in outburst mode brighten by as much as a factor of 100 to magnitude 14. I found it around magnitude 14.7 after an alert went out. And the cool part is that it only took me about 10 minutes of real time to do the whole experiment ’cause there is zero setup time on the scope—no lugging it out of the garage, polar aligning, calibrating, blah blah blah. Just log in, take the data, log out. Even with discounts, it’s not something I could do a lot of (about $0.56/minute rental), but it takes a lot of minutes to add up to the expense of the type of equipment you can rent there.