Twelve-thousand laser-AO observations: first results from the Robo-AO large surveys

Creators: Law, Nicholas M.; Baranec, Christoph; Riddle, Reed L.

Others:: Marchetti, Enrico; Close, Laird M.; Véran, Jean-Pierre

Abstract

Robo-AO is the first AO system which can feasibly perform surveys of thousands of targets. The system has been operating in a fully robotic mode on the Palomar 1.5m telescope for almost two years. Robo-AO has completed nearly 12,000 high-angular-resolution observations in almost 20 separate science programs including exoplanet characterization, field star binarity, young star binarity and solar system observations. We summarize the Robo-AO surveys and the observations completed to date. We also describe the data-reduction pipeline we developed for Robo-AO—the first fully-automated AO data-reduction, point-spread-function subtraction and companion-search pipeline.

Additional Information

© 2014 SPIE. The Robo-AO system is supported by collaborating partner institutions, the California Institute of Technology and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. AST-0906060 and AST-0960343, by the Mount Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and by a gift from Samuel Oschin. We are grateful to the Palomar Observatory staff for their ongoing support of Robo-AO on the 60-inch telescope, particularly S. Kunsman, M. Doyle, J. Henning, R. Walters, G. Van Idsinga, B. Baker, K. Dunscombe and D. Roderick. C.B. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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