Upper Derek Schreck of Las Vegas, NV, one of the telescope's proctors, says the robotic telescope is best for observing individual deep sky objects. "When I want to pan the sky and see what looks interesting," he says, "I use one of the other telescopes with a wider field of view." But for many people, especially students new to astronomy, finding a particular object in the sky through a standard telescope can be time consuming, and tracking one even more so. "Now," says Schreck, "you can do so much more observation with this robotic system because it finds objects so quickly, and you can see objects that are too dim to see otherwise."

Making the most of a good thing

For Harper, the telescope has curricular significance. "It opens the door to quantitative astronomy for us," he explains. Digital images from the telescope are projected on a screen or on individual computer monitors in the classroom so that classes can take measurements and make calculations from them. "We can detect the rotation of an asteroid by measuring variations in the intensity of light coming from it," says Harper, "and in one night we can get data for the whole light curve of a variable star, something that could take days to do otherwise." Darius Ameri '03 of Tigard, OR, the telescope's other proctor, says, "What's great about working with a digital image is that you can enhance it, enlarge it -- you can get so much more detail than you can sketch in your notebook."

Telescope designer Jerry Gunn, an amateur astronomer and technology coordinator at Metamora Township High School in Metamora, IL, has designed similar robotic systems all over the country, including an identical one at the Yerkes Observatory in Chicago. With such a system, Gunn says, "students and amateur observers can do real research and not get bogged down with the difficult task of setting up the telescope and CCD cameras each night they want to observe." Demand for his designs exceeds supply, and Gunn builds robotic telescopes for institutions he believes will make full use of the instrument's potential. Gunn regularly operates the Academy's telescope from Illinois. On campus in February to train Academy operators, Gunn proclaimed the telescope's housing and roof hydraulic system -- designed and built by the PEA facilities management team -- to be the best he's seen on any of his telescopes.

Currently, the telescope must be operated in real time, but there are plans to have it fully automated by the fall. It records images in black and white -- which is how we see the night sky -- though one can build accurate color images by layering color-filtered pictures. Harper says his students are particularly excited about this prospect. "Our eyes don't register color in the dark, but it's there," he says. "With this telescope a whole universe of invisible light has become visible." Does the robotic telescope make the other Academy instruments obsolete? "Absolutely not," says Schreck. "There's just no substitute for seeing something firsthand."

-Laura Chisholm, editor