Robotic Astronomy
Call for Papers
The number of automatic astronomical facilities worldwide continues to grow, and the level of robotisation, autonomy, and networking is increasing as well. This has a strong impact in many astrophysical fields, like the search for extrasolar planets, the monitoring of variable stars in our galaxy, the study of active galactic nuclei, the detection and monitoring of supernovae, and the immediate follow-up of high-energy transients such as gamma-ray bursts.
The main focus of this special issue will be on the new and existing astronomical facilities whose goal is to observe a wide variety of astrophysical targets with no (or very little) human interaction. The special issue will become an international forum for researchers to summarize the most recent developments and ideas in the field, with a special emphasis given to the technical and observational results obtained within the last five years. The topics to be covered include, but not limited to:
- Robotic astronomy: historical perspective
- Existing robotic observatories worldwide
- New hardware and software developments
- Real-time analysis pipelines
- Archiving the data
- Telescope and observatory control systems
- Transient detection and classification
- Protocols for robotic telescope networks
- Standards and protocols for transient reporting
- Scientific results obtained by means of robotic observatories
- Global networks
- Future strategies
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/guidelines.html. Authors should follow the Advances in Astronomy manuscript format described at the journal site http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:
| Manuscript Due | June 15, 2009 |
| First Round of Reviews | September 15, 2009 |
| Publication Date | December 15, 2009 |
Lead Guest Editor
Guest Editors
- Joshua S. Bloom, Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
- Lorraine Hanlon, School of Physics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
- Frederic Hessman, Institut für Astrophysik, Georg-August-Universität, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
- Taro Kotani, Department of Physics and Mathematics, Aoyama Gakuin University, 5-10-1 Fuchinobe, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 229-8558, Japan