In late June, I was a lucky participant in a workshop at McDonald Observatory as part of the University of Texas/Sofia-EXES educational outreach program headed up by Dr. Keely Finkelstein. We got to use LCOGT. The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network is not one, but a collection of robotic telescopes scattered around the world. One of the nodes, as they are called, is “El Paso” which is actually atop Mt Fowlkes at McDonald Observatory. The nodes are named for the nearest major airport instead of the actual location of the telescope.

At the workshop we did some imaging with the LCO network and processed our data with the help of some fantastic observatory staff (I’m talking about you Marc Wetzel, Judy Meyer, and Rachel Fuechsl). We also spent part of each night helping out with an observing run for Dr. Chris Sneden and his postdoctoral fellow Dr. Monica Adamow using the Tull spectrograph on the 2.7m Harlan J. Smith telescope. You can see the 2.7m telescope dome from atop Mt. Fowlkes where the LCO node sits.

The LCO project is all about getting data remotely. Even though we were on-site, the entire system operates on the web. There are queue scheduling options which means any site that can image your target could be tasked and there are site-specific scheduling options but if the site isn’t imaging, you’re out of luck.

I’ve included my processed images of an open star cluster and the heart of the North American Nebula (NGC 7000). The entire nebula takes up too big of an area for a single field-of-view to encompass. Once the network has collected your data, you as an astronomer can access the semi-reduced images taken through each filter. The data pipeline exists to save time for the astronomer. It’s up to me to build my final image from the individual exposures I directed the telescope to capture. For those that have done some astronomical imaging using telescopes and CCD cameras, the pain of dark frames, flat-fields, bias frames and other processing is well-known. But the data pipeline LCO has put together means all I have to do is process my individual exposures to generate colored images.

First I used FITS Liberator (free cross-platform download) to get the white/black balance fixed and to convert the raw images into TIFF files. Then I used Photoshop to create the full-color images. LCO has some useful instructions on using FITS Liberator and Photoshop available. If you don’t like my final products, feel free to take a crack at creating your own color images from my data.

Each node is an autonomous robot. People are on site, but mainly the system turns on, checks the weather, opens up, self-collimates, calibrates the electronics, and gets on-sky and collecting data for the network. Many of the electronic system were designed by LCO and are in use at each site.

The in-house systems are modular and upgradeable and the data lives in the cloud. All the astronomer needs is a web-browser and allotted time on the network. It isn’t cheap to get access, but these are research-grade systems. I plan to use the LCO and the data gathered by it for lab work with my astronomy classes.

Although time on the scopes ins’t free, the various nodes do have publicly accessible all-sky and dome cameras. Plus much of the data collected by the network is available for the public to access and process.