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S. Amrose, C. Akerlof (U. Michigan), R. Balsano, J. Bloch, D. Casperson, S. Fletcher, G. Gisler, J. Hills (LANL), R. Kehoe, B. Lee (U. Michigan), S. Marshall (LLNL), T. McKay (U. Michigan), R. Miller (LANL), A. Pawl (U. Michigan), W. Preidhorsky, J. Szymanski, J. Wren (LANL), ROTSE Collaboration
The Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE-I) has obtained images in more than 100 epochs for the entire sky north of -30\circ declination over a period of 1 year. ROTSE photometry is accurate to better than 5% for objects brighter than mV = 13; the limiting magnitude is \geq 14. We present early and promising results of an automated search for new RR Lyrae stars in the 2 terabyte ROTSE database. Preliminary studies indicate that thousands of new RR Lyraes brighter than 14th magnitude will be discovered. Known RR-Lyraes from the General Catalog of Variable Stars are recovered automatically with high efficiency. Spectroscopic observations of these new variables will be used to place lower limits on the distance to high velocity clouds found in our galaxy. We conclude with prospects for extending the ROTSE-I survey over the entire sky, and for extending wide area variable studies to 19th magnitude with ROTSE-II.
If the author provided an email address or URL for general inquiries, it is a
s follows:
www.umich.edu/~rotse