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R. L. Mutel (University of Iowa)
The University of Iowa has recently completed construction of a 0.5m fully robotic telescope in southern Arizona. The telescope is computer controlled and is operated from campus in Iowa City via the Internet. It is primarily used by undergraduates in astronomical laboratory projects and for research projects such as asteroid rotation studies, supernova searches and binary star light curves. A typical night's observing consists of 600-800 images generated from 30-50 separate observing programs. On clear nights we typically reach a limiting magnitude V~9.5 in 30 seconds with a seeing disk of FWHM ~2.5 arcsec. I will describe our experience in using this facility as part of the undergraduate laboratory curriculum as well as for individual student research projects.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: rlm@astro.physics.uiowa.edu