The schmidt 67/92 robotic telescope - roboschmidt user manual

Abstract

The 67/91 Schmidt telescope is the largest instrument of this type in Italy. It was officially commissioned in 1966; in 1991 the telescope was moved to mount Ekar, near the Copernico 1.82m telescope, in order to take advantage of the higher altitude and lower light pollution. In 2017 the telescope has been considerably refurbished (new CCD camera, new filters, autoguider) and remotely controlled. Starting from May, 2020 updates of both hardware and software allowed the implementation of the fully robotic operational mode . The observing blocks (OB) are submitted at any time by the PIs of the proposals or their collaborators. The Robotic System has a rapid-response capability that allows it to interrupt regular observations in order to observe transient phenomena with high priority.