The High Energy Astrophysics group of the stellar department of the Astronomical
Institute in Ondřejov operates two small aperture robotic telescopes
called BART and D50. Both telescopes are capable of making automatic followup
observation of gamma-ray burst optical counterparts. This paper deals with
the smaller telescope BART.

Martin Nekola

René Hudec

Martin Jelínek

Petr Kubánek

Jan Štrobl

Cyril Polášek

BART: The Czech Autonomous Observatory

We present the result of a year-long effort to think, design, build, realize, and manage the robotic, autonomous REM observatory, placed since June 2003 on the cerro La Silla, ESO Chile. The various aspects of the management and control are here surveyed, with the nice ideas and the wrong dead ends we encountered under way. Now REM is offered to the international astronomical community, a real, schedulable telescope, automatic for the People.

Emilio Molinari

Stefano Covino

Francesco D&#39;Alessio

Dino Fugazza

Giuseppe Malaspina

Luciano Nicastro

Mauro Stefanon

Vincenzo Testa

Gino Tosti

Fabrizio Vitali

REM: Automatic for the People

The ESA satellite to be launched in 2012 will focus on highly precise astrometry of stars and all objects down to limiting magnitude 20. Albeit focusing on astrometry related matters, the satellite will also provide photometric and spectral information and hence important inputs for various branches of astrophysics. Within the Gaia Variability Unit CU7 and related work package Specific Object Studies there are subwork packages accepted for optical counterparts of celestial high-energy sources and cataclysmic variables. Although the sampling of the photometric data will not be optimal for this type of work, the strength of Gaia in such analyses is the fine spectral resolution (spectrophotometry and ultra-low dispersion spectroscopy) which will allow the correct classication of related triggers. We will review the available low dispersion spectral surveys and discuss their use for a simulation and tests of the Gaia algorithms and Gaia data.

Ren&#x00E9; Hudec

Vojt&#x011B;ch &#x0160;imon

Luk&#x00E1;&#x0161; Hudec

Photometry and Low Dispersion Spectroscopy with ESA Gaia

The T35 is a small telescope (<svg style="vertical-align:-0.0pt;width:23.8125px;" id="M1" height="12.7625" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 23.8125 12.7625" width="23.8125" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
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</svg>) equipped with a large format CCD camera installed in the Sierra Nevada Observatory (SNO) in Southern Spain. This telescope will be a useful tool for the detecting and the studying of pulsating stars, particularly, in open clusters. In this paper, we describe the automation process of the T35 and also show some images taken with the new instrumentation.

Susana Mart&#237;n-Ruiz

Francisco J. Aceituno

Miguel Abril

Luis P. Costillo

Antonio Garc&#237;a

Jos&#233; Luis de la Rosa

Isabel Bustamante

Juan Gutierrez-Soto

H&#233;ctor Mag&#225;n

Jos&#233; Luis Ramos

Marcos Ubierna

T35: A Small Automatic Telescope for Long-Term Observing Campaigns

FUSP is the automatic multimode spectrophotopolarimeter aimed to the study of fast optical transients in the photometric, photopolarimetric (instant measurement of linear polarization), and spectropolarimetric (with or without the slit) modes. The mode change is automatic depending on the transient brightness and the purposes of the observations and may be performed in half a second. The instrument may be equipped with either fast EM-CCD or a position-sensitive detector which may provide temporal resolution up to 1 microsecond. FUSP is the robotic instrument for the robotic telescopes.

Vladimir Plokhotnichenko

Grigory Beskin

Sergey Karpov

Sergey Bondar

Vjacheslav de-Boer

Alexandre Lioubetski

Dmitry Badjin

Fast Universal Spectrophotopolarimeter for Robotic Telescopes

In order to detect and investigate short stochastic optical flares from a number of variable astrophysical objects (GRBs, SNe, flare stars, CVs, X-Ray binaries) of unknown localizations as well as near-earth objects (NEOs), both
natural and artificial, it is necessary to perform the systematic monitoring of large regions of the sky with high temporal resolution. Here we discuss the criteria for a system that is able to perform such a task and describe two cameras we created for wide-field monitoring with high temporal resolution—FAVOR and TORTORA. Also, we describe basic principles of real-time data processing for the high frame rates needed to achieve subsecond temporal resolution on a typical hardware.

Adriano Guarnieri

Corrado Bartolini

Giuseppe Greco

Adalberto Piccioni

Wide and Fast: Monitoring the Sky in Subsecond Domain with the FAVOR and TORTORA Cameras

We review current results and perspectives of the photometric monitoring of the optical counterparts of X-ray sources of various kinds (binary X-ray sources (cataclysmic variables and low-mass X-ray binaries, supersoft X-ray sources, microquasars), gamma-ray bursts). We discuss the problems of the monitoring of the individual kinds of objects in the optical and X-ray passbands.  We show the importance of multifilter monitoring to obtain a deeper understanding of the physical processes and to resolve between the individual emission mechanisms. We also show that there are brief, unique, and little understood phenomena which are very promising targets for the optical monitoring, for example, flares in intermediate polars.

Monitoring of X-Ray Sources in the Optical Spectral Region

This paper covers the various aspect of design, manufacturing and commissioning of the infrared camera BIRCAM, installed at BOOTES-IR, the 60&#x2009;cm robotic infrared telescope at Sierra Nevada Observatory (OSN, Granada, Spain). We describe how we achieved a quality astronomical image, moving from the scientific requirements.

Alberto Riva

Paolo Conconi

Alberto Javier Castro-Tirado

Filippo Zerbi

Ronan Cunniffe

Martin Jelinek

Stanislav V&#xec;tek

Design, Manufacturing, and Commissioning of BIRCAM (Bootes InfraRed CAMera)

The Lowell Observatory 0.8-m (31-in) Telescope was augmented by the addition of a robotic mode of operation in early 2001. This system executes any predetermined sequence of observing instructions without supervision. Described herein is a general description of the system, lessons learned from the conversion, and a few general algorithms for focusing, collecting twilight flat field images, and scheduling standard star observations.

Marc W. Buie

Converting from Classical to Robotic Astronomy: The Lowell Observatory 0.8-m Telescope

We report on two alternative simple methods to detect counterparts of cosmic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and optical transients (OTs). We report on the development and tests of an alternative optical all-sky monitor recently tested at the Karlovy Vary Observatory. The monitor is based on a Peleng 8 mm fish-eye lens (1 : 3,5–1 : 16) and CANON EOS 350D digital CCD camera. This type of monitor represents a low-cost device suitable for easy replication and still able to detect brighter optical transients simultaneously to GRB triggers. Such OTs have been observed for some of the GRBs such as GRB990123, GRB060117, or recently GRB080319 indicating that some fraction of GRBs can generate optical transient emission accessible by simple small aperture instrumentation as described here. These efforts are accompanied by development of dedicated programmes to access and to evaluate all-sky images; these efforts will be also briefly described. The All-Sky Monitor is a space variant optical system and its point spread function (PSF) has not uniform shape in the field of view. The processing and measuring of image data is complicated, and sophisticated deconvolution algorithms are used for image restoration. The second method is the GRB detection based on their ionospheric response.

R. Hudec

M. Spurny

M. Krizek

P. Pata

R. Slosiar

M. Rerabek

M. Klima

Detection of GRBs and OTs by All-Sky Optical and SID Monitors

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