Robots take control of Lick telescope

17 Jun 2002

Computers soon will take total control of a 30-inch telescope at Lick Observatory, making it the most sensitive fully robotic telescope anywhere. The Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), built by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, was dedicated this week by officials from UC Santa Cruz, which operates the observatory atop Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose, California.

KAIT will devote itself full-time to checking the night sky for flaring supernovas, to following the changing brightnesses of variable stars, or to observing any object that changes over short or long periods of time. Since it is totally under computer control, the telescope can easily be redirected to new targets. KAIT can track a given area of the sky for hours, better than any other robotic telescope now in operation. During a half-hour observation KAIT can detect objects 10,000 times fainter than other such telescopes, or a million times fainter than the human eye can see unaided.