The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey : the multi-telescope robotic observatory

Creators: Lehner, M. J.; Wen, C.-Y.; Wang, J.-H.; Marshall, S. L.; Schwamb, M. E.; Zhang, Z.-W.; Bianco, F. B.; Giammarco, J.; Porrata, R.; Alcock, C.; Axelrod, T.; Byun, Y.-I.; Chen, W. P.; Cook, K. H.; Dave, R.; King, S.-K.; Lee, T.; Lin, H.-C.; Wang, S.-Y.; Rice, J. A.; de Pater, I.

Abstract

The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) operates four fully automatic telescopes to search for occultations of stars by Kuiper Belt Objects. It is a versatile facility that is also useful for the study of initial optical GRB afterglows. This paper provides a detailed description of the TAOS multi-telescope system, control software, and high-speed imaging.

Additional Information

© 2009 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2008 February 4; accepted 2009 January 22; published 2009 February 26. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant AST-0501681 and by NASA under grant NNG04G113G, both at the Harvard College Observatory. Work at Academia Sinica was supported in part by the thematic research program AS-88-TP-A02. The work at National Central University was supported by grant NSC 96-2112-M-008-024- MY3. SLM's work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and by Stanford Linear Accelerator Center under Contract DEAC02- 76SF00515. Work at Yonsei was supported by the KRCF grant to the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. KHC's work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and in part under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. MJL wishes to thank Jeff Klein at the University of Pennsylvania for valuable advice regarding the system hardware development. MES wishes to thank Jeff Goldader and Gary Bernstein at the University of Pennsylvania for advice on the TAOS field selection.

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