Egerton Wharf, Twelve Quays House, Birkenhead, PO: CH41 1LD, Merseyside (United Kingdom)

Single-sited

United Kingdom

The Liverpool Telescope (LT) is a fully autonomous 2.0m optical telescope situated on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. It runs completely without human intervention and offers the opportunity for international users to flexibly schedule their observations at any time over the internet via its robotic dynamic-response scheduler. The robotic controller decides for itself what to observe through each night, adapting to object visibility and weather variations. Data is usually reduced and distributed to users the next morning. Thanks to its dynamic scheduling and fully-open enclosure design, it can perform rapid-response override observations of transient time-domain events such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae.Instruments comprise an optical camera, optical polarimeter, a dual-beam integral-field input spectrograph, and a fast-readout optical camera, and wide-field cameras mounted parallel to the telescope for context and further science. The optical component of a new infrared/optical instrument is online and will take over from the optical camera in the near future. Its IR component is currently in development.The LT is owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Time-domain, Robotics, Autonomous, GRB, Supernovae, Optical, Telescopes, Rapid-response

Telescopes
Data Archives, Data Repositories and Collections

Information Science and Technology
Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics and Mathematics

Physical Sciences and Engineering