Robotic telescope
An open loop telescope is sometimes said to be operating on faith, in that if something goes wrong, there is no way for the control system to detect it and compensate.
A common such input would be position encoders on the telescope's axes of motion, or the capability of evaluating the system's images to ensure it was pointed at the correct field of view when they were exposed.
Early examples were expensive, had limited capabilities, and included a large number of unique subsystems, both in hardware and software.
The 1985 book, Microcomputer Control of Telescopes, by Mark Trueblood and Russell M. Genet, was a landmark engineering study in the field.
In 2004, some professional robotic telescopes were characterized by a lack of design creativity and a reliance on closed source and proprietary software.
Often, robotic telescope software developed at universities becomes impossible to maintain and ultimately obsolete because the graduate students who wrote it move on to new positions, and their institutions lose their knowledge.
Large telescope consortia or government funded laboratories don't tend to have this same loss of developers as experienced by universities.
LINEAR's competitors, the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search, Catalina Sky Survey, Spacewatch, and others, have also developed varying levels of automation.
In 1997, the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) wide-field telescope array, named ROTSE-I, began operation in manual mode.
The project was headed by Tom Vestrand and his team: James Wren, Robert White, P. Wozniak, and Heath Davis.
[5] Its new mandate will be the monitoring of the night sky looking for interesting and anomalous behaviors in persistent sources using some of the most advanced robotic software ever deployed.
A prerequisite for the explosion of amateur robotic telescopes was the availability of relatively inexpensive CCD cameras, which appeared on the commercial market in the early 1990s.
The main motive behind the development of amateur robotic telescopes has been the tedium of making research-oriented astronomical observations, such as taking endlessly repetitive images of a variable star.
He also wrote and published the first examples of this standard, in the form of commercial telescope control and image analysis programs, and several freeware components.
Through this technology, a master control system that integrated these applications could easily be written in perl, VBScript, or JavaScript.
Also in 1998, the Tenagra Observatories site near Cottage Grove, Oregon was constructed by Michael Schwartz with a robotic 14-inch (360 mm) Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope c.
In order to support growing list of mounts, sensors, CCDs and roof systems, it uses own, text based communication protocol.
In comparison to the Microsoft Windows centric ASCOM standard, INDI is a platform independent protocol developed by Elwood C. Downey of ClearSky Institute to support control, automation, data acquisition, and exchange among hardware devices and software frontends.
They are self contained robotic astronomical imaging devices that combine a small (50mm to 114mm in diameter) telescope and mount with pre-packaged software designed for astrophotography of deep-sky objects.
They come with a database of pre-programmed objects, per-determined imaging routines, and Mobile app software that allows the end user to begin astrophotography as soon as the telescope is set up.
