Astronomy (11) Once available only to professional astronomers, remote, robotic observatories are now being built and used by small colleges as well as by amateur astronomers. Reliable, mass-produced telescopes and robotic mounts have become available within the past ten years. Successful remote observatories developed for education include projects such as the Telescopes in Education program as well as the remote observatory developed by Angelo State University.
A remote observatory is a valuable tool for undergraduate education, especially for urban colleges such as Reed, which is located in Portland under light-polluted and frequently-cloudy skies. The project supports a remote, robotic observatory located outside the Portland area and used for undergraduate education and research as well as public outreach. The observatory houses a 16-inch RCOS telescope on a Paramount ME robotic mount and is used for two purposes: by Reed physics undergraduates collecting data for senior thesis projects in observational astrophysics; and by students in introductory and advanced astronomy courses to collect data for labs. For labs and demonstrations, the telescope would be operated in real time over the internet. When not operated in real time, it would be scripted to automatically collect data for long-term, student-directed projects, possibly including spectroscopic monitoring of close binary stars and the detection and astrometry of near-earth asteroids.
