Automated Management and Scheduling of Remote Automatic Telescopes

摘要

This paper describes our project on advanced planning and scheduling for remote, fully automatic telescopes. In addition to a more advanced automatic scheduler for nightly observations, our project is also building automated tools to address the entire life-cycle of an observation request, from original receipt to the return of raw data and preliminary data reduction. Our focus is on providing software tools to help a telescope manager who represents a community of participating astronomers; however, the increased automation also improves the way in which the astronomers interact with this manager. Our goal is to make it possible for participating astronomers to submit observation requests and obtain results from a remotely located telescope, via electronic networks, without the necessity of human intervention.