Robotic Telescopes

As a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University I was heavilly involved with the Nassua Station Robotic Telescope Project. In brief, the project's aim is the convert a meter-class telescope into a robot that will automatically perform photometric and spectroscopic observations.I wrote on the order of 60,000 lines of code (in C and Fortran) for the project. My areas of main responsibility were various sub-systems involved with the operation of the telescope (i.e. weather monitoring and power switching) and the telescope to web-server interface. I also wrote the first generation scheduling software (which is still in use as far as I know) which converts the database of requested observations into an observing list for each night. In addtion to authoring software I also got my hands dirty and assisted with snaking wires, greasing gears, cleaning mirrors, painting the telescope, etc. I was the telescope rat who climbed down in the telescope tube when that was required.

I aquired a lot of hands-on experience on the Nassau Station Robotic Telescope Project and I have keen interest in applying this experience again if the oportunity were to present itself.