Universal focal reducer for small telescopes

Astronomy With Small Telescopes

The All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) is monitoring all sky to about 14 mag with a cadence of about 1 day; it has discovered about 10 variable stars, most of them new. The instrument used for the survey had aperture of 7 cm. A search for planetary transits has lead to the discovery of about a dozen confirmed planets, so called ’hot Jupiters’, providing the information of planetary masses and radi...

Spectroscopy on Small Telescopes: the Echelle Spectrograph

In recent years there has been a trend toward the automation of modest sized observatories, especially those involved with photoelectric photometry. Although undoubtedly useful, there is clearly a need for more advanced instrumentation such as spectrographs. The relatively small telescope sizes places severe limits on the choice of spectrograph configuration. A fiber-fed echelle spectrograph is...

Using Small Radio Telescopes for Very Long Baseline Interferometry

Throughout the summer development has continued on the next generation of the Small Radio Telescope for use as a Very Long Baseline Interferometry type interferometer. This paper discusses the difficulties with setting up this new interferometer and presents some results obtained using this small radio telescope interferometer. We used 3 small radio telescopes to form one baseline of about 5 me...

The Potential of Small Space Telescopes for Exoplanet Observations

The imaging of faint exoplanets near bright stars requires the development of very high contrast detection techniques, including both precise wavefront control and deep starlight rejection. A system-level proof-of-principle experiment carried out at at the Palomar Observatory has recently demonstrated that exoplanets can be detected very near stars even with a fairly small (1.5 m diameter) tele...

Mani and shapur a universal faith for e universal kingdom