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--- obs:bootes_1 [2008/09/06 20:54] – external edit 127.0.0.1
+++ obs:bootes_1 [Unknown date] (current) – external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1
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 {{:obs:bootes-old1a.jpg?120 |}}
-BOOTES was founded in 1997, with a single dome and a 20 cm Meade LX200 mount, piggybacked with two wide-field lenses with the idea to follow BATSE alerts and to perform automated scans of the sky. These old GRB alerts had large uncertrainities, so only wide-field observation was considered important. Two SBIG ST-8 cameras with Nikkor 50 mm 1:1.2 lenses were used. They had a field of view 16 x 11 degrees, limiting magnitude ~14.0, and were mounted perpendicularly to each other. Obtained images were analyzed with a specialised pipeline designed for an accelerator board Photomate 20 with two signal processors Texas Instruments TMS320C40 [[http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/10853853_113|(Petr Páta et al., 2001)]].
+BOOTES was founded in 1998, with a single dome and a 20 cm Meade LX200 mount, piggybacked with two wide-field lenses with the idea to follow BATSE alerts and to perform automated scans of the sky. These old GRB alerts had large uncertrainities, so only wide-field observation was considered important. Two SBIG ST-8 cameras with Nikkor 50 mm 1:1.2 lenses were used. They had a field of view 16 x 11 degrees, limiting magnitude ~14.0, and were mounted perpendicularly to each other. Obtained images were analyzed with a specialised pipeline designed for an accelerator board Photomate 20 with two signal processors Texas Instruments TMS320C40 [[http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/10853853_113|(Petr Páta et al., 2001)]].
 ===== Instrumentation =====
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 {{ :obs:bootes1b-2008.jpg?200|BOOTES-1B}}
+BOOTES-1B is a 30 cm Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a fast slewing Paramount-ME mount, equipped with a FLI CM-8 1536x1024 pixel (Kodak KAF1602) CCD camera. It's primary objective is follow-up of satellite GRB alerts. It can interrupt the ongoing observation,  slew and start acquiring images of the proposed GRB location with a typical delay of 30s after the alert reception. Typical limiting magnitude of the earliest 10-second unfiltered exposures is 15. Later, with longer exposures, a limiting magnitude of about 18 can be achieved.
-BOOTES-1B is a 30 cm Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a fast slewing Paramount-ME mount, equipped with an Andor iXon 889 512x512 pixel EMCCD camera. It's primary objective is follow-up of satellite GRB alerts. It can interrupt the ongoing observation,  slew and start acquiring images of the proposed GRB location with a typical delay of 30s after the alert reception. Typical limiting magnitude of the earliest 2-second unfiltered exposures is 15. Later, with 60s exposures, a limiting magnitude of about 18 can be achieved.
+The telescope observes without filters to maximize throughput. Its current configuration with the Meade 1:6.3 focal reducer and the CCD provides an image scale of 1.05”/pixel and a field of view of 26.8'x17.8' (F=1771mm, or f/5.8).
-The telescope observes without filters to maximize throughput.
 Since its installation the telescope has followed 5 GRBs with positive detections. These are GRB 080330, GRB 080413A, GRB 080430, GRB 080603B and GRB 080605.
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 There have been two major downtimes: The first caused by the disastrous mount failure which happened at November 12, 2006 and disabled the telescope for 7 months.
 The second ocurred between July 10, 2008 and August 28, 2008 (1.5 months) due to a dome failure.
 ==== BOOTES-1A ====
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 To achieve optimum performance, we made several improvements to the main optical system. It has an heated frontal optical window, which protects the precious optical instrument during the daily service. Further, the CCD needed a specially designed collimating tool to be correctly placed in respect to the lenses optical axis. Nikon lens mount did not prove to be rigid enough to support ~3kg camera and was prone to bending, resulting in image quality drop.
-Piggybacked atop the large lens, there is a small 1536x1024 CCD camera FLI MX8 with even larger field of view.
+Piggybacked atop the large lens, there is a small 1536x1024 CCD camera FLI MX8 with Nikkor 18mm/2.8 wide-field lens, providing even larger field of view - 40°x26°, similar to the size of the earliest //GLAST-Fermi///GBM burst localizations.
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 ===== Weather sensing =====
+As an independent robotic observatory, BOOTES has various devices to sense the weather. Currently, a multi level decision model in order to decide whether to observe or not. The following detectors are used during the decision whether the observation is possible or not.
+  * Manual blocking (implemented, in use)
+  * Rain sensor (implemented, in use)
+  * Weather sensor tower (implemented, intended to use for a humidity alert, not used now)
+  * Cloud-meter (implemented, in use)
+  * Allsky camera (implemented, not integrated into rts2)
+  * Meteosat image processing (implemented, never used)