Small telescopes and robotics

Abstract

Over the past decade, Small Automated Telescopes have been developed at. various observatories. The operation of these telescopes and their related observations are carried out under the control of a computer and thus the technology comes under the field of robotics. The important merits of such a telescope are high efficiency and low costs, as compared to the general purpose telescopes for a particularly chosen class of observation like photoelectric photometry, automated search type observations etc. IUCAA has developed a prototype version of such a telescope using a 14 inch aperture optical tube assembly from Celestron and it uses microstepping motors along with friction gears for the telescope drives. The pointing and tracking is done using a thermo-electrically cooled CCD. This technology is being extended to the University sector and the Bangalore University has started assembly of another such telescope at IUCAA laboratory for their own use. The telescopes will primarily be used for making photometeic observationns of variable stars using a photometer developed at IUCAA. The paper describes various design and fabrication aspects of such a telescope.