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E. S. Rykoff, C. W. Akerlof (U. Michigan), D. Casperson, G. Gisler (LANL), R. Kehoe (Fermi Nat'l Lab.), S. Marshall (LLNL), K. McGowan (LANL), T. McKay (U. Michigan), M. Ashley, A. Phillips (U. New South Wales, Australia), D. A. Smith (U. Michigan), W. T. Vestrand, P. Wozniak, J. Wren (LANL)
The ROTSE-III prototype telescope is a fully automated, robotic telescope with a 0.45 m aperture and 1.9\circ field of view. Its primary mission is to respond rapidly (<10 s) to GRB triggers from satellites such as HETE-2 and Swift. The telescope can image down to USNO mR~18.5 in a 60 s exposure with a 6 s readout on an unfiltered CCD. Since September 2001 we have taken patrol data of 90 fields (3.5 square degrees each), in two epochs each night. We calibrated the telescope against 270 square degrees of the equatorial stripe in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Early Data Release, which has publicly available five-color photometry as well as galaxy spectra. We have performed a transient and variable search and have provided light curves for variables detected in SDSS observations. Funded by NASA, NSF, University of Michigan, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: erykoff@umich.edu