We report on optical observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) followed up by our collaboration with the 1.23 m telescope located at the Calar Alto observatory. The 1.23 m telescope is an old facility, currently undergoing upgrades to enable fully autonomous response to GRB alerts. We discuss the current status of the control system upgrade of the 1.23 m telescope. The upgrade is being done by our group based on the Remote Telescope System, 2nd Version (RTS2), which controls the available instruments and interacts with the EPICS database of Calar Alto. (Our group is called ARAE (Robotic Astronomy & High-Energy Astrophysics) and is based on members of IAA (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía). Currently the ARAE group is responsible to develop the BOOTES network of robotic telescopes (Jelínek et al. 2009).) Currently the telescope can run fully autonomously or under observer supervision using RTS2. The fast reaction response mode for GRB reaction (typically with response times below 3 minutes from the GRB onset) still needs some development and testing. The telescope is usually operated in legacy interactive mode, with periods of supervised autonomous runs under RTS2. We show the preliminary results of several GRBs followed up with observer intervention during the testing phase of the 1.23 m control software upgrade.
The 1.23 m telescope is at the German-Spanish observatory of Calar Alto (CAHA) in the province of Almeria, Southeast of Spain. The observatory’s altitude (2168 m), mean seeing (0.
View of the Calar Alto observatory. The picture shows the five telescopes of Calar Alto and the staff building (lower-right corner). The arrow shows the localization of the 1.23 m telescope.
The 1.23 m telescope is a Ritchey-Crétien telescope built in 1975 by Carl Zeiss. The focal ratio of the telescope is f/8 with a total field of view of
The 1.23 m telescope of Calar Alto. (a) The drawing shows the mechanics and the hydraulic system of the 1.23 m telescope of Calar Alto. One of the mechanical peculiarities of the telescope is the presence of a steel sphere (indicated by a red arrow) which, by means of a high-pressure hydraulic system, supports all the weight of the telescope. (b)
Two instruments are available for the 1.23 m, the MAGIC near-infrared camera and the 2 k
The field of view of the optical CCD camera is
The CCD chip is refrigerated using liquid nitrogen, which makes dark current negligible, fewer than 2 electrons per hour. The readout noise is also low, about 7 electrons. However, the chip has several bad columns which RTS2 (see next section and [
A call for proposals was issued by CAHA in 2008 for the use of the 1.23 m telescope over 4 years. Six teams obtained observing time, having the following scientific drivers: Solar System bodies, Binary stars, Transits of exoplanets, T Tauri stars, and GRBs. The 1.23 m is also scheduled for public outreach purposes, usually associated to high schools.
The ARAE (Robotic Astronomy & High-Energy Astrophysics) group of IAA (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, partner in the CAHA operations) agreed to contribute to CAHA by providing the control system of the 1.23 m telescope. (See
As none of the telescope instruments, nor their control electronics and software was developed by our group, we are kept away from the complex details of their construction and internal operation. As described later, we exclusively communicate with the control interfaces of the existing software.
The existing control system is an adapted version of that currently used by the 3.5 m Calar Alto telescope. It allows the observer to control the instruments through graphical user interface (GUI) programs running on two main observatory computers—one for the telescope control and the other for the camera. The observer is responsible for preparing the observing plan, opening and closing of the dome, taking care of executing exposures, inspecting images for good pointing and their quality, and synchronizing the telescope and the filter wheel movements with the CCD exposures. The major drawbacks of this approach are obvious: the observer spends most of the night working hard to get the data and keep the system running, and the system is prone to human errors when the observer is tired. Moreover, the observing logs are either hard to extract from the technical log or are not created by the system at all, and the interruption of the observation to react on a quickly evolving target of opportunity requires observer presence and attention.
In contrast, RTS2 was designed to create an autonomous observatory environment. The observer is allowed to interact with the system, and at worst case to take full manual control. The system is able to guide the observatory through the night, taking care of closing and opening the dome, acquiring sky flats, darks, and last, but not least, keeping detailed logs of the images acquired, judging pointing accuracy and producing preliminary results.
RTS2 device drivers are responsible for handling any errors that occur during their operation. If possible, the device is reset, and another attempt to get it operating is made. The RTS2
The autonomous capabilities of the RTS2 system reside in a generic layer, with underlying hardware-specific drivers and communication via the TCP/IP network stack. So in an ideal world, once the provided skeleton drivers are used to write low-level RTS2 drivers for the hardware, every telescope can be made fully autonomous. To our knowledge, this is a big step forward from the traditional, incremental way of how observatory control software has been developed. Instead of being written primarily as a set of controls for the hardware, with some subsequent autopilot features, RTS2 was designed from the start to provide autonomous capabilities. Secondarily RTS2 also provides a way for the observer to interact directly with the hardware.
Development of the first version of the RTS2 drivers was a question of a few days (and nights), since the RTS2 drivers were being written by the main author of RTS2 (with the assistance of the CAHA staff). The major obstacle which we had to face was running RTS2 on an old Solaris operating system, which is used to run the 1.23 m control computers. As RTS2 was written in quite portable C++ on Linux, and using GNU Autotools (GNU Autotools website:
The remaining obstacle is the lack of a natural incorporation of the autoguider in the RTS2 environment. This fact prevents us from taking images with long exposure times. Tests performed with the 1.23 m showed that exposures longer than 300 s produce elongated Point-Spread-Functions (PSFs), especially under sub-arc-second seeing conditions. The guider is an old instrument, with a quite complicated interface, without any autonomous capabilities. Thus, some time will be needed before we will be able to perform observations with the guider smoothly integrated in RTS2.
Currently the 1.23 m is able to respond to GRB alerts generated by the GRB Coordinates Network (GCN). The maximum slew time of the 1.23 m telescope is 4 minutes for the most unfavourable move. Usually the response time is below 3 minutes. The response time is limited by the speed of the current engines/mechanics moving the dome and the telescope. Given that the existing telescope/dome mechanical parts are strong and reliable, CAHA does not plan to renew them, so we do expect to overcome the slew-time limitation in the near future. The RTS2 Gamma-Ray Burst Daemon (
The MAGIC near-infrared and optical CCD cameras of the 1.23 m telescope, both in the Cassegrain focus of the telescope. (a) shows MAGIC near-infrared camera. The MAGIC detector is a 256
Flow diagram of the GCN network and the response mode of the 1.23 m telescope. The whole process can take up to 4 minutes, depending on the position of the GRB on sky. The time needed to receive the coordinates from the high-energy satellite in the RTS2 server takes just a few seconds (usually less than 15 seconds). Currently most of the delay is due to the slow pointing of the 1.23 m, which could take up to 4 minutes in the worst case.
When a high-energy satellite (usually the
The RTS2 control system stores most of the data in a
The system has a powerful internal scripting engine, which enables users to define the observing strategy. By tracking devices states, the system handles synchronization among instruments, so the user does not have to know the details of the execution of the underlying observation. Scripting enables the user to specify all image parameters, dithering strategy, selected filters, and much more. For example, the following script runs observations in
Note that the syntax for the subwindow in the above example is (
In the near future we plan to provide also a rough photometric calibration based on the USNO-B catalogue [
Further improvements on this status are likely doable, so we feel confident that, under the current limitations (for instance, the telescope slew speed), we could reduce the GRB response times. This might allow us to detect the prompt optical emission associated to the gamma-ray event.
Another potential upgrade of the 1.23 m telescope could be the incorporation of MAGIC in RTS2. Rapid response observations with MAGIC would make the 1.23 m telescope very competitive in the GRB field. Currently this is beyond our scopes (and also beyond the CAHA man-power maintenance capabilities), but we do not discard it since the flexibility of RTS2 to accommodate new devices would allow us to integrate MAGIC (and new possible visitor instruments) quickly.
The following subsections provide descriptions of the legacy interfaces and their interaction with RTS2.
The individual operations of the CAHA telescopes are coordinated, and controlled, by the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS website:
The 1.23 m telescope mount, its focuser, and the camera filter wheel are all fully controllable through EPICS. The legacy telescope interface accepts objects coordinates in the J2000 coordinate system, and handles all the required calculations internally, including precession, aberration, reflection, and telescope pointing model offsets. Both the filter wheel and the focuser can be controlled through their own EPICS channels. Other devices in the 1.23 m telescope system do not exist in the EPICS universe: the CCD detector, the auto-guider camera, the dome itself, and various auxiliary switches (e.g., the dome lights).
We use the information provided through EPICS to automate several tasks of the 1.23 m. For instance, the meteorological information available from the EPICS is used to trigger the bad weather state, and hence to close the dome (Based on calculated Sun position through
Yet another possible application lies in coordinating observations with the other Calar Alto telescopes. From the EPICS system, RTS2 can learn what the targets of the other telescopes are, whether they are in the RTS2 database, and depending on the target information can either start their monitoring or remove them from the list of targets which should be observed.
The optical CCD detector is connected to its own control computer. The control computer communicates with the control software, running on a master workstation, over the network. From the available C source code, we created an RTS2 device driver. All the major settings are supported, including binning and partial chip readout. The camera behaves as just another RTS2 supported CCD camera, visible in monitoring software and available for scripting.
The guider is built from a video camera with an image intensifier, fed from a pickoff mirror on a two-axis stage. This allows to place the guider image anywhere in the telescope field of view (FoV), thus eliminating the significant disadvantages of autoguiding-by-astrometry using the main camera: limited detector FoV, low gain, and a requirement for short exposure times. The guider camera has its own control computer, which assumes that the observer is sitting in front of it (e.g., the video output is sent directly to the screen). Partial remote control has since been provided, in part by placing a web camera in front of the guiding screen.
We would like to improve this setup with a fully integrated RTS2 device, which would transparently provide automatic search for bright stars in the FoV, and guiding capabilities. In principle, RTS2 is able to do this, and some promising tests were already carried out on the other RTS2 controlled telescopes. Currently the biggest problem is to figure out how to communicate with the guider, and to implement a full autoguiding loop.
As the dome is a critical component, its control is separate from the EPICS system (although dome status is reported to EPICS). In order to change the dome state, special commands must be run on the dome control computer. Similar commands are available to turn off and on dome lights and to control the telescope drives, the hydraulics, the tracking, and the mirror cover. Those commands are fully interfaced in RTS2, so RTS2 is able to control all those switches.
Although not fully autonomous, the 1.23 m has already performed followup optical observations of GRBs. None of the results below itemized was acquired by the automatic response mode of the RTS2 package, but some data were manually acquired by using RTS2 as the observing tool. Most of the data were taken by in situ observers, using the currently available GUI.
All the below listed GRBs showed X-ray afterglows which were localized by the XRT X-ray telescope on board
The optical afterglow of this GRB [
We detected the afterglow of GRB 090424 [
The figure shows the optical afterglow of GRB 090424 as detected with the 1.23 m CAHA telescope. The image has been created by combining
The picture shows the coadded
Coadded
We detected the two afterglow candidates reported for this GRB [
This GRB was observed in July 27.9646-28.0063 UT in the
GRB 090813 represents the first optical afterglow discovered with the 1.23 m CAHA telescope.
This is the only GRB detected by the INTEGRAL satellite to date that we have followed up with the 1.23 m telescope. We carried out a series of
The 1.23 m is a wide-purpose telescope which is currently used by six international teams to perform long-term projects with a duration of four years. The ARAE group of IAA is responsible for automating the telescope operations so that such teams can perform their (usually long) observing campaigns without errors, yet enabling quick override observations of GRBs.
The GRB results obtained to date have been mostly taken by night observers. Use of the fully autonomous mode, provided by RTS2, is pending nontrivial integration of the guider. After this is done, we have reasonable hopes to believe that telescope will be able to react to GRB alerts in a few minutes. This could allow us to detect the optical emission at the first stages of the explosion, making the associated GRB science much more attractive for the GRB community.
We acquired images for seven GRBs, detecting the optical afterglows of four of them. The typical reaction time of these observations ranged from
The research of J. Gorosabel, A.J. Castro-Tirado, R. Cunniffe and M. Jelínek is supported by the Spanish programmes AYA2008-03467/ESP, AYA2009-14000-C03-01, and AYA2007-63677. We are very grateful to all of the CAHA staff and in particular to Ulli Thiele for his excellent support with the 1.23 m telescope. P. Kubánek would like to acknowledge generous financial support provided by Spanish