Continued Development and Growth of the Skynet Robotic Telescope Network

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) has been building a global network of fully automated, or robotic, telescopes, called "Skynet". Skynet is capable of controlling scores of telescopes simultaneously, including most commercially available small-telescope hardware, and now numbers 20 telescopes spanning Chile, Australia, the United States, and Italy. Skynet fulfills both research and education missions, for tens of thousands of users -- including professionals and students of all ages, graduate school through elementary school. Skynet's user community consists of UNC-CH, 13 regional undergraduate institutions including three minority-serving institutions, and UNC-CH's Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. Partnerships with many other institutions, nationally and internationally, produce additional high-impact, small-telescope science. This program directly supports Skynet's senior systems engineer to (1) continue to integrate new instruments and new telescopes into Skynet; (2) continue to develop Skynet's telescope control and web-based, dynamic queue-scheduling software; and (3) continue to develop Afterglow, which is easy-to-learn and easy-to-use, but publication quality, web-based data reduction and analysis software integrated into Skynet's database. These efforts will significantly impact UNC-CH's ability to study gamma-ray bursts, but more importantly, they will significantly impact research and research training that is being carried out across Skynet's larger, and rapidly growing, user community, on transient and time-variable phenomena in general.