A Gamma-Ray Burst Rapid Response Observatory in the US Virgin Islands

Details A Gamma-Ray Burst Rapid Response Observatory in the US Virgin Islands A Gamma-Ray Burst Rapid Response Observatory in the US Virgin Islands

May 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004aas...204.1010g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 204, #10.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 36, p.673

Mathematics

Scientific paper

The College of Charleston (CofC) is one of three institutions that belongs to a consortium led by the Division of Science and Mathematics at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) to maintain and operate an automated research grade telescope on the island of St. Thomas (18 deg, 21 arcmin N, 65 deg W at an elevation 1325 ft with 1-arcsecond seeing). The location provides 80% sky coverage of the southern celestial hemisphere and, on average, about 6 hours of clear sky per night, except during the peak of hurricane season. The extreme eastern US location will also allow very early observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), making the observatory an ideal facility for responding to GRBs. CofC leads the primary research function of this facility: rapid, automated follow-up observations of GRBs observed with NASA's Swift spacecraft, to be launched in September 2004, via the GCN. The newly renovated observatory houses a new robotic 0.5 m Cassegrain telescope with a back-illuminated Marconi 42-40 2048x2048 imaging CCD and 12-position UBVRI filter wheel. Assuming 1.5 arcsecond seeing and a S/N=5, we can obtain a limiting (unfiltered) magnitude of 19 with a 10 second integration time. The slew rate is >10 degrees per second. With the exceptional sky coverage, we anticipate a detection rate of about 10-15% of the Swift detection rate and making a significant contribution to the global network of small telescopes dedicated to GRB observations.

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