MRI-R^2 : Acquisition of Equipment in Support of Automatic Telescope Systems at a Research and Teaching Observatory

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)A generous donor is providing Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina with a new 17-inch telescope to be used jointly by the donor and ASU. The telescope will be housed in an existing dome at the university's "Dark Sky Observatory" (DSO) located at an elevation of over 3,000 feet about 20 miles from Boone. This telescope will join three others already operating at DSO and the costs for its installation will be aided by an award from NSF's Major Research Instrumentation program from the Division of Astronomical Sciences. Dr. Daniel Caton, a professor of astronomy at ASU and director of the DSO, is the principal investigator for the award. The funding will also be used to fully automate this and other DSO telescopes so that they can be operated remotely over the internet, either from the ASU campus or from other locations. The telescopes will be used to train students in observational astronomy and to carry out on-going research program in variable stars, Quasar and Active Galactic Nuclei variability, Gamma Ray Burst follow-up observations, and studies of binary asteroids.