Starspot mapping with robotic telescopes

✍ Scribed by M. Weber

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 356 KB
• Volume: 323
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-6337
• DOI: 10.1002/1521-3994(200208)323:3/4<299::aid-asna299>3.0.co;2-z

✦ Synopsis

Robotic telescopes for photometry and imaging have been around for several years. They have been very valuable to monitor light variations due to changing spot patterns on active stars. Two new spectroscopic robotic telescopes will come online in the near future, one in Tenerife and one in Arizona. Together with the existing photometric robotic telescopes, these new telescopes make several groups of stars a better accessible for surface mapping techniques. One of these groups are stars with long rotation periods, since monitoring of several rotations of these stars requires too much telecope time. Another group consists of stars with rotation periods of (almost) exactly one, two, ... days. The 100 AE separation of the two telescopes makes observations of such targets possible in less time, which also means that changes on the surface can be viewed with higher time resolution.