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T. McKay, C. Akerlof, S. Amrose, R. Kehoe, A. Pawl, J. Schaefer (University of Michigan), R. Balsano, J. Bloch, D. Casperson, S. Fletcher, G. Gisler, J. Hills, J. Szymanski, J. Wren (Los Alamos National Lab), S. Marshall (Lawrence Livermore National Lab), B. Lee (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), ROTSE Collaboration
ROTSE-I is a small, fully robotic, telescope with a 16 degree by 16 degree field of view. In addition to observing optical bursts associated with GRBs, ROTSE-I regularly patrols the night sky. It obtains images of the entire visible sky for two epochs every night. This data has been obtained continuously since March 1998, and now includes 2.5 Terabytes of data ideally suited for identification of bright variable stars.
We have recently completed analysis of 6% of the ROTSE-I sky coverage. In these 2000 square degrees we identify 1950 periodic variable stars, 90% of which are new. The brightest of these have mean magnitudes of mv=9.5 and the faintest mv=15.5. Essentially all types of variables are found, including large new samples of RR Lyraes, Contact Binaries, Eclipsing systems, Cepheids, Delta Scuti stars, and long period variables. Most of these objects are useful for studies of galactic structure. These initial results demonstrate that the full ROTSE-I variable catalog will include about 30,000 variable stars, with uniform coverage of the full sky north of -30 degrees dec.
ROTSE is supported by NASA, the NSF, the University of Michigan, and Los Alamos National Lab.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tamckay@umich.edu