Artificial intelligence and why astronomers don’t look through a telescope anymore

As a child I had the opportunity to utilize the two-meter Faulkes Telescope in Siding Spring, Australia. I remember it was a very thrilling experience seeing the telescope move via a live webcam. I would input sky coordinates, and over the course of a minute, the telescope would slowly tilt toward the object. I couldn’t wait to become an astronomer and spend countless nights at the actual telescope sites — Hawaii, Chile, Spain, these are all locations with powerful telescopes that I wished to use one day.

But little did I know, the era of manual observations was coming to an end.

My first professional research experience occurred when I was hired as an intern at the Las Cumbres Observatory, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, my hometown. Though it is called an observatory, no telescope is actually located there. Las Cumbres comprises over 30 instruments across the world, with the mission of always having a telescope in the dark, ready to make observations at a moment’s notice.

Artificial intelligence and why astronomers don’t look through a telescope anymore
Daniel GodinesStar News






As a child I had the opportunity to utilize the two-meter Faulkes Telescope in Siding Spring, Australia. I remember it was a very thrilling experience seeing the telescope move via a live webcam. I would input sky coordinates, and over the course of a minute, the telescope would slowly tilt toward the object. I couldn’t wait to become an astronomer and spend countless nights at the actual telescope sites — Hawaii, Chile, Spain, these are all locations with powerful telescopes that I wished to use one day.


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But little did I know, the era of manual observations was coming to an end.

My first professional research experience occurred when I was hired as an intern at the Las Cumbres Observatory, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, my hometown. Though it is called an observatory, no telescope is actually located there. Las Cumbres comprises over 30 instruments across the world, with the mission of always having a telescope in the dark, ready to make observations at a moment’s notice.

Daniel Godines
Their telescope system is very streamlined, and is a prime example of how astronomical observations function today. The telescopes are all controlled robotically, requiring almost no human intervention, except for select engineers responsible for instrument maintenance. The scheduling is also controlled robotically, and while astronomers can request observations during certain nights, the observations are ultimately booked and controlled by an automated system that is programmed to select the best targets, according to instrument availability and weather conditions across all sites; an analysis that is performed in mere seconds.

It is indeed becoming increasingly rarer for astronomers to visit sites and perform actual observations, as manual control of telescopes, when necessary, is often done remotely from the comfort of one’s home; and any collaboration is simply done via zoom. Gone are the days of Edwin Hubble, who would effectively live for extended periods of time on the mountain, observing night after night, collecting plates of data one at a time.

Source: lcsun-news.com