We have 9 telescopes currently in the AAVSOnet robotic telescope network. Remote observing is very different than having a telescope in your back yard. Images are taken automatically, calibrated automatically, and sent to the person requesting the images automatically.
However, this “hands-off” approach is ripe for problems. The sky could be cloudy when the system is taking twilight flats. A filter wheel can get stuck in position (this happened with OC61 recently). The camera might not be cooling properly or doesn’t reach operating temperature during hot summer nights.
So we have a set of “image inspectors” that do a hands-on look at the images coming off the telescopes. We would like to have 9 of these inspectors, one for each telescope. Or, one person can handle more than one telescope, especially since they don’t get new images every night.
It takes about 15-30 minutes per day to inspect the images. There are tools to page through the images; Cliff produces a nice report that goes on-line every day, indicating how well the system is cooling, the mount pointing performance and other engineering parameters. For some systems, we even have all-sky movies through the night.
The purpose of image inspection is mostly to inform the AAVSOnet team when something doesn’t look right. We’re working on a way to publicize that information so that researchers also know of problems.
We have a few openings for image inspectors. Please email me directly if you are interested (arne@aavso.org). Join the team!