News

2006-09-30

A Busy week (this last and the next). The new enclosures have been installed at Fenton Hill for the three new telescopes. Mounts and optics coming soon. First up will be RAPTOR T with RAPTOR K by years end (we hope). RAPTOR A and P were moved to new pad locations to accommodate the new enclosures.

2006-07-12

Our new paper has come out in Nature today. "Energy input and response form prompt and early optical afterglow emission in gamma ray bursts", Nature Letters, 13 July 2006, 442, 172-175.

A new webcam has been installed at RAPTOR S we will eventually provide images from this to the web page, but the actual live viewing and control will be team only. If this works well, then hopefully we will get another one soon to be able to provide an overview of the whole Fenton Hill site.

RSS Feeds are now in place and available as one per different alert source. I thought it would be better than sending them as a composite. If you wish the composite feed of GCN's the visit eSTAR. If you want to pick and choose your feeds then visit the Alert page.

2006-06-19

We have not set up the manual insertion web page for generating VOEvents from manual (non-robotic) systems. This site is available both through this web site and the one offered by eSTAR. Many thanks to Alasdair Allan of eSTAR for taking me under his wing and teaching this old C++ guy how to do proper CGI and Java script code in order to make this work.

Go to the Home or Alerts page and follow the links to this new page...However you will need a password. We don't want just anybody sending alerts into our respective systems so email the team to get approved and get a password to access the page.

2006-06-19

HTN 2 meeting in Gottingen July 23-26. Book your reservations now!

2006-06-01

Alasdair Allan (eSTAR) project has arrived to day and will be working with us for the next month. We will be implementing standards for telescope communications between our TALONS and eSTAR. Much more to come including a manual VOEvent insertion page....

2006 -05-21

New paper submitted and accepted to ApJ.  See publication page for GRB 060206 paper

2006-04-02

New paper submitted to Nature stay tuned for more information on 050820a. Once released we will post it here.

2006-03-01

A new server

The website has been moved over to a new server. This will allow us more flexibility in running our scripts. A new front page link will take you to the alerts sub-page where you can find updating links to the VOEvent files generated from every alert moving through TALONS.

An RSS feed for these pages is in the works.

2006-02-27

Attendance at SPIE

We will be representing at the SPIE (Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentations - 2006) this year with talks on; Telescope network development and Observatory operations and scheduling.

see the SPIE website for more info

2005-12-15

Where is our snow!!!

No white Xmas this year!

2005-12-10

Several of us have attended the second VOEvent workshop. We were able to show the passing of data between the eStar system and TALONS as our first step.

Additional work fleshed out needs of possible participants, adjustments to the VOEvent 1.0 standard and interoperability systems.

Important interop decisions were made to use a standard byte packet, plain vanilla TCP/IP for "push" communications and RSS feeds for "pull"

more information at the VOEvent website

2005-09-14

The Heterogeneous network webpage is now up and running. This is full of useful information.

2005-07-23

Robert and Alasdair have now merged their respective operational network nodes and interconnected TALONS with eStar. Each system acts within their system as a proprietary network. However each system can now communicate requests and data between them.

2005-07-23

Robert attends the Heterogeneous Telescope Network Workshop hosted by the University of Exeter and the eScience group headed by Alasdair Allen.

A lot of work performed in establishing standards for the creation of such a network. Most issues cleared up, with sociology being one of the major sticking points.

For more information see http://htn-workshop2005.ex.ac.uk/

2005-05-06

Article in Nature

We have been notified that our article submitted for NATURE , "A link between prompt optical and prompt gamma-ray emission in gamma-ray bursts" will be published next week. This article references the burst 041219

2005-05-02

Pain in the weather

So this is our dry time. We are more like Seattle than the New Mexico high steppe. The weather and clouds have made us miss several good targets this spring. Thankfully we will return to our normal weather patterns soon...just in time for the monsoons. On a bright note the grass is green this year.

2005-04-18

NVO Event Workshop

We have just returned from the workshop with a load of objectives. All went very well with many points discussed and hashed out. In the end a general agreement was reached on format. You can see more at the NVO Event Website (registration required). Additional comment and input is always welcome.

We are the test bed for the new VOEvent communication. Robert will begin adding an XML Schema communication protocol to the normal TALONS communication scheme. RAPTOR events transferred through TALONS will then be available in XML VOEvent "style". Przemek will begin development of a persistent event database as a prototype. We will also add the capability to query and inject requests to TALONS for events and also to be able to manual inject events in VOEvent style directly to the system. A conversion of GCN alerts to VOEvent style is also underway.

2005-04-01

April Fools...Not!

A new version of the TALONS Central has gone on line. First major update since its original coding in 2002. Also a new version of the client and monitor are available and a new feature...The Injector!

2005-03-28

New Home for TALONS and SkyDOT

Robert has just brought on-line a new computer system for housing the TALONS Central telescope communication system. The new computer is a high speed DELL server with RAID 5 spinning disk array. The TALONS system needs the high speed computing and communication provided by the system. Przemek will also use the RAID and High speed computing of the system as a new home for SkyDot and other databases.

2005-03-10

We got our first good SWIFT trigger this last evening. Information is being studied now. This winter has been incredibly wet and cloudy, most unusual for us.

2005-02-18

NVO Event Development

Robert, Tom and Przemek are scheduled to attend the NVO Event Development Workshop in California

2005-02-15

RAPTOR T development

The RAPTOR T mount and OTAs have been placed in the high bay area of out building. Weather conditions have made it impractical to get the large mount up to Fenton Hill and conduct initial operations tests there, so we opted for a nice warm comfortable environment. Testing and integration will cover the next few months. Once the roads thaw and an enclosure is built, the system will be ready to go.

2005-01-27

Automated focusing

RAPTOR s is undergoing testing of an automated focusing system. A model for focusing is being developed by Stuart Evans and James Wren. So far all looks good. It will be tested and operational within the next couple of months. This focuser will take into account pointing, mirror flexing, and temperature fluctuations of the RAPTOR S system and the local environment. This prototype will eventually be utilized in the development of the RAPTOR T (four color) system.

2005-01-03

Happy New Year

Our first full RAPTOR S response to GCN 2889 via INTEGRAL has been a big success for us. Image depth and detail are excellent for the system. See Details

New encoders and DEC drives have been placed on RAPTORs A, B and P. This should alleviate the constant re-setting of the encoder followers due to temperature changes.

2004-12-20

We received a solid INTEGRAL burst last night. The information is being studied now.

2004-12-06

Additional modules have been coded and added to the TALON alert system. These modules will allow RAPTOR to respond to triggers by the SWIFT satellite. TALON receives the alerts via the GCN alert system. We are setting TALON to have RAPTOR respond to alerts type 60, 61, 67, 81, 82 and 83, in the SWIFT alert set.

Now we anxiously await our first SWIFT alert.

2004-12-01

New look to the website created.

We also are currently working at improving mount performance and testing new camera systems. The new cameras might give us some additional speed in image download.

Jim Wren has designed and created an automatic focusing system for the large 400mm Canon lenses used as fovea on RAPTORs A and B. He has also implemented the temperature compensating focuser on RAPTOR S. Tests are ongoing to determine a good auto focusing model for RAPTOR S.