Project Overview

The robotic 1.3m telescope, officially dedicated at 21 October 2004 01:55:38 UT, allows for autonomous queue-scheduled observing, affording the ability to conduct multi-object survey and monitoring projects and rapidly follow-up on transient astrophysical events. The telescope operations comprise automatic weather sensing for dome control, automatic telescope pointing and focus, and automatic data reduction and processing. The automated 1.3-m telescope + 2MASS instrument ("PAIRITEL") (commissioning date October 20, 2004) will be operated in a queue scheduled mode that is interruptible with Targets of Opportunity (ToOs), primarily from the Swift satellite. The project will transition to Committee-allocated observing time in June 2007. From the outset, three key projects have been identified. Two of these are ToO driven and will comprise roughly 15-20% of the observing time each. The Spitzer Complement survey key project can fill the remainder of the observing time, but we envision a series of smaller proposals from the CfA community that could be interwoven with the key projects; some of these are described in the Science Case document. Target lists are auto-generated from figures of merit derived from proposal rankings, immediacy of observation requirements, positional information, and weather.

Acknowledgements

The Peters Automated Infrared Imaging Telescope (PAIRITEL) is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and was made possible by a grant from the Harvard University Milton Fund, the camera loan from the University of Virginia, and the continued support of the SAO and UC Berkeley. The PAIRITEL project and JSB are further supported by NASA/Swift Guest Investigator Grant # NNG06GH50G. We thank M. Skrutskie for his continued support of the PAIRITEL project.

Last modified: Mon Aug 31 08:54:06 PDT 2009