Eight Years of TIGRE Robotic Spectroscopy: Operational Experience and Selected Scientific Results

Abstract

TIGRE (Telescopio Internacional de Guanajuato Robótico Espectroscópico) has been operating in fully robotic mode in the La Luz Observatory (Guanajuato, Mexico) since the end of 2013. With its sole instrument, HEROS, an échelle spectrograph with a spectral resolution R ∼20,000, TIGRE has collected more than 48,000 spectra of 1,151 different sources with a total exposure time of more than 11,000 h in these 8 years. Here we briefly describe the system and the upgrades performed during the last years. We present the statistics of the weather conditions at the La Luz Observatory, emphasizing the characteristics that affect the astronomical observations. We evaluate the performance and efficiency of TIGRE, both optical and operational, and describe the improvements of the system implemented to optimize the telescope’s performance and meet the requirements of the astronomer in terms of timing constraints for the observations and the quality of the spectra. We describe the actions taken to slow down the optical efficiency loss due to the aging of the optical surfaces as well as the upgrades of the scheduler and the observing procedures to minimize the time lost due to interrupted observations or observations that do not reach the required quality. Finally, we highlight a few of the main scientific results obtained with TIGRE data.

A multi-wavelength view of the multiple activity cycles of ϵ Eridani

“…From these data, S MWO values were derived and already published in Coffaro et al (2020), where a more detailed description of these data can also be found. Coffaro et al (2020) also presented S MWO values from the TIGRE telescope located in Guanajato, Mexico (Schmitt et al 2014;González-Pérez et al 2022). The optical monitoring with the TIGRE telescope of ϵ Eri is still ongoing, and we present here data until mid-February 2022.…”

Bright spectroscopic binaries: III. Binary systems with orbital periods of P > 500 days

“…For the observations of the time series of spectra, we used the 1.2 m robotic telescope TIGRE (González‐Pérez et al 2022; Schmitt et al 2014). The spectrograph has an intermediate resolution of $$$ R\approx \mathrm{20,000} $$$ in a spectral range from about 3800 to 8800 Å, with a small gap of about 120 Å around 5800 Å.…”

Diving into the magnetosphere of the Of?p star HD 108

“…From 2013 on, we also monitored HD 108 with the 1.2 m TI-GRE telescope (Schmitt et al 2014;González-Perez et al 2022) at La Luz Observatory near Guanajuato (Mexico). TIGRE is operated in a fully robotic way and uses the refurbished HEROS echelle spectrograph (Kaufer 1998;Schmitt et al 2014) which offers a spectral resolving power of 20 000 over the optical range from 3760 -8700 Å.…”