Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network

Abstract

Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) is a young organization dedicated to time-domain observations at optical and (potentially) near-IR wavelengths. To this end, LCOGT is constructing a world-wide network of telescopes, including the two 2m Faulkes telescopes, as many as 17 x 1m telescopes, and as many as 23 x 40cm telescopes. These telescopes initially will be outfitted for imaging and (excepting the 40cm telescopes) spectroscopy at wavelengths between the atmospheric UV cutoff and the roughly 1-micron limit of silicon detectors. Since the first of LCOGT's 1m telescopes are now being deployed, we lay out here LCOGT's scientific goals and the requirements that these goals place on network architecture and performance, we summarize the network's present and projected level of development, and we describe our expected schedule for completing it. In the bulk of the paper, we describe in detail the technical approaches that we have adopted to attain the desired performance. In particular, we discuss our choices for the number and location of network sites, for the number and sizes of telescopes, for the specifications of the first generation of instruments, for the software that will schedule and control the network's telescopes and reduce and archive its data, and for the structure of the scientific and educational programs for which the network will provide observations.Comment: 59 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. AAS Latex v5.2. Accepted for publication in Pub. Astr. Soc. Pacifi

Type Ii Supernova Energetics and Comparison of Light Curves to Shock-Cooling Models

“…Photometry for iPTF13dkk, iPTF13dqy , and iPTF13dzb were supplemented with data from the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT; Brown et al 2013). This was obtained by PSF fitting, and fitting a low-order polynomial to the background.…”

HATS-8b: A LOW-DENSITY TRANSITING SUPER-NEPTUNE

“…Again, the monitoring was carried out in the i-band, this time using the E2V imaging camera with exposure times of 150 s. The egress of the transit of HATS-8b was detected with these observations, as detailed in Figure 2. Finally, nine days later we observed another transit of HATS8b, this time using the LCOGT 1 m telescope network (Brown et al 2013). This observation was carried out with the LCOGT 1 m telescope at CTIO in Chile using the Sinistro imaging camera in the i-band with a 300 s exposure time and the telescope slightly defocused.…”

KELT-4Ab: AN INFLATED HOT JUPITER TRANSITING THE BRIGHT (V∼ 10) COMPONENT OF A HIERARCHICAL TRIPLE

“…The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) consists of a 0.8 m prototype telescope and nine 1 m telescopes spread around the world (Brown et al 2013). We used the prototype telescope (labeled "BOS") to observe transits in the Sloan i band and the Sloan g band.…”