One Long Pair of Eyes

So tonight, or tomorrow morning, depending on you're point of view, I'll be observing a supernova with the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on top of Mauna Kea on the big island of Hawaii. However, I won't be in Hawaii while I'm observing. Instead, I'll be doing it from the 11th floor of Blackett Laboratory in central London while watching the sun come up over Battersea Power Station (that building on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals). Occasionally even I get a little amazed at technology, and I must admit that this certainly pleases the gadget freak in me.

IRTF has this great facility for doing remote observing. The telescope is still steered by an on-site operator, but the observer no longer has to fly out to Hawaii to do the observing. If you have a fast net connection and a Unix box, you can actually xhost the telescope controls over the internet to your desktop workstation in real time! It's all very Jetsons.

For general users this spares you a costly (though often pleasant) trip to Hawaii. For IRTF, it means they can schedule lots of half nights and such relatively easily. For people like me it's a true godsend. In the supernova business, we never know when our targets are going to show up, but when they do, we want to act fast. So now I can write proposals to ask for ``Target-of-Opportunity'' observations. If a new supernova goes off, I can bump the scheduled observer for an hour and run my operations. But I don't need to buy an emergency ticket to fly halfway around the world. I just need to get up at 4AM and catch the tube to work a couple hours early.