[vsnet-chat 7453] Robotic Telescope Observations. Their future nature?

[roboscopethoughts at Safe-mail.net]

Do you know, I've been thinking.  I try not to but sometimes it happens anyway.

Given the AAVSO APASS initiative, which is some sort of all sky photometric survey, there will be in a year or two's time a large reservoir of reference stars for photometric calibration.

At that time thing's like AAVSO's own AAVSONET, or as APASS is ostensibly going to have public data releases and a database server therefor, any other robotic telescope network, whether nonprofit or commercial, will be able to return pipelined photometry directly to the user.  They could probably do it now, given slight differences in procedure, but I believe mostly fits files are returned and users do their own photometric solution.  A homogeneous and hopefully consistent all sky reference resource would help facilitate pipelining of such.

The photometric solution appears to primarily consist of conveyor belt procedures, where files are put through a selection of procedures, primarily via 'black box' applications, in a particular way, and the photometry of the object in question derived.  Some, I believe, have even automated most of this work themselves via scripting, as some of the software involved readily allows script access to their routines.

So there is no real reason to see why the remote acquisition server couldn't automate the end result just as readily as mainstream allsky surveys do.  The position of the target star is known, the positions of the image stars measurable, and photometric references logged in something like APASS, with the applications and algorithms scriptable.  Might be a bit tricky on computational overhead at the server end, but machines are now fast and hard disks ever bigger for less cost.  Even near realtime end product photometry acquisition may not be that far away.

In the end a catalogue of variables could be accessed, not much different to how telescopes are pointed via various electronic devices nowadays (either by handset or planetarium program), but via a web interface, as some remote telescopes are even accessed now.   Observations of a star are booked, they are taken, they are reduced, they are returned to the user via password ftp or some secure form or other or via email attachment.  Or possibly even directly forwarded to the AAVSO International Database in the case of AAVSONET and APASS, or as a feature option from other roboscope services, cutting out the middleman.  I primarily use AAVSO as an example here as the combination of AAVSONET, APASS, many GPL distributed photometric packages (whether IRAF or whatever) and the International Database archive mean they are potentially connected technically and in practice to all aspects of epoch photometry data acquisition, data processing and data archiving.  The used network could instead be one of the commercial roboscopes, or one of the other public domain roboscope initiatives.  Most processing will use one of a suite of well known GPL or similar licence applications even if encased in proprietary scripts, that's universal.  Main archiving will be possible at several places too, but these are all usually independent to each other, and can include an AAVSO aspect as part of the chain and/or parallel to it.

Now, when that happens, when in a year or two all these aspects are connectable, when a star can be picked (possibly even from a presented suggested menu, for if someone decides to observe an alert object current alert systems are as capable of notifying roboscopes and their control software via rss feed in votable format or just being manually updated by staff), when the automatics point the 'scope, take the image, store the image, process the image, pipeline the magnitude measure, and someone has paid for it (whether directly or whether using a system as part of an allowance from a membership subscription or a public outreach service funded in some governmental or organisational way), will they have made an observation or will they have _sponsored _ an observation?  Will such and such school or group have done an observation run or engaged in a public outreach event without particularly having actually had much active hands on?

Even more telling are the alert cases.  For a robotic network where twenty separate people could request the same object on the same night why waste the 'scope time on taking twenty different observations?  If it is time series work over several hours that becomes the norm in terms of request, all twenty people will get the same results for the same night if only one telescope is used for time series quality photometry.  It'll be interesting if the commercial organisations give discount rates in such shared events, or charge each recipient in full.  Time series access is rare at the moment, but will become more prevalent, possibly even offered as a premium rate service if any commercial group has any marketing sense, and in such cases they would have to be careful to ensure only one recipient, the one willing to pay over the odds.  Pay per view photometry.

Not observations, sponsorship.  Not quite like the 'name a star' sponsorship, more like the 'adopt a zoo animal' sponsorship.  Applying to 'alert objects' and to run of the mill classical observations alike :- "tonight's featured R Aql measure was sponsored by...".

I personally see it being at this level already, even if people have to process their own fits files.  But others will differ on where the borderline lies.

Taking a great deal of data and doing something with it oneself, possibly to publication level, takes it above simple sponsorship to the level of actually doing some work on it.

But nevertheless this does not mean that the sponsorship way is a negative one.  It opens up the possibility for many people who otherwise could not do so to take part in and contribute to matters astronomical, in ways that may later lead to them progressing to taking a greater interest and/or more involved participation and/or self development within the subject.

It should hopefully be more rewarding for them than buying a star name, and hopefully leave them with the same sort of feeling as people who do indeed adopt a zoo animal or a fiftieth "stake" in an orang utan or panda or north american bison or whatever in some wildlife rehabilitation scheme.

Where the problem lies is with the mindless morons, and there are a handful, who take this robotic system and claim much greatness and astronomic capability and knowledge when they quite evidently have nothing more than an ability to splash out some cash.  Let me be clear, these people are in the strong minority.  Much take up of robotic telescope use by the variable star community this past year or two seems to be mostly by traditional observers, both visual and CCD, trying to compensate for a long run of unfriendly weather patterns, especially in Europe and northern North America.

However the minority are very vociferous about their due adulation and credit for having spent their few quid/bucks/euros (hmmm, what's a widely used common slang term for euros?).

This has consequences beyond the nit picking.  At times data providers are acknowledged and even included as co-authors in papers.  Rightly so in many cases.

However, there are aspects to this.  If, for example, Albert Jones is included in a scientific paper as a coauthor for providing nearly sixty years of consistent and homogeneous visual data on a variable star, this is quite understandable.  Such a consistent and long run of homogeneous data is rare, and the consistent nature of it acknowledgeable in a provenance context as its nature is relevant to the analysis.  It will have been chosen for use deliberately by the other authors for those reasons.  That is one extreme of the data provision spectrum.

But would the same warrant for someone who'd paid for ten to twenty hours of times series observations on a roboscope and just passed the data on?  This may be a real case before long, and it is not always certain that provision of fits files instead of end product photometry is a sufficient distinction even now.  If processed properly with tried and tested applications the result is the result, and "processed properly" is very much a rote route nowadays, following a recipe, so to speak.  In fact I can only assume that the lack of an allsky set of secondary standards is the only reason end product photometry is not provided.  If true allsky techniques with Landolt fields segued into the procedure were used even that wouldn't be necessary.

An acknowledgement of providing the data is certainly necessary, papers have acknowledgement sections.  The long winded point I'm trying to make is that said acknowledgement should name the provider and not thank them for providing the data but thank them for "sponsoring the data acquisition".  It's a nit picking point.  But the situation is open to charlatans and a form of protection has to be built in early.

A (not entirely too extreme) extrapolation would be to suggest that there is nothing to stop a 'name a star' company from buying up joblots of commercial rentascope time, at a slightly higher premium rate to make their offer attractive, taking data, providing it to professionals for free as long as the provision was accepted that source was acknowledged (if the source wanted to be a coauthor professionals might not be so accepting), and selling the 'observer name' rights to customers.

As a mentioned sponsor in the acknowledgements section of a scientific paper there might even be something useful to the community here, if watched carefully, money isn't wasted on 'naming stars', someone gets a gift for a relative or loved one, rather than some invalid certificate, a tangible real return, and the community gets data.  Some may see no problem with that, some may loath the very concept at base.

As a means of insinuating and insisting on full scientific credit and using such an event to claim to having made scientific contributions and to being an astronomer of note and merit, well, that's a different matter.  But that happens already.  Some of the things done with roboscopes are already sufficiently automated enough to be called sponsored contributions, and not observations, and some very few claim much about their work and contributions based upon these sponsorships, all the more dangerous as some of it is about as scientifically rooted as a creationist debating with an ideological politician.  That is, no more capable of recognising the presence of an ugly little fact if it bit them forcefully on the arse, let alone capable of engaging in scientific method.

Thought for the Day Ends.

Summary : roboscope networks are potentially very enabling things, both to people who want to take part in astronomy and/or in astronomy as a science and to astronomy as a science itself via their ability to provide useful data.  However, the sheer level of current and potential automation opens matters to abuse when ability to claim much can be made on no more grounds than having spent some cash.  This has already happened in some cases and situations, but is mostly very rare.  The potential for it to happen on a more serious and commercial level with little difference to the current extant infrastructure, ie the only reason it isn't happening at an organised level is because no one has gotten around to doing it yet, is something the astronomical community in general hasn't got its collective brain around yet in order to be ready for the problem.  Much of astronomy is already sponsored.  Some commercially, as per certain web and software organisations with respect to telescopes.  The question will be where does difference in degree slip over to being difference in kind.  It's not easy to define.  It's very easy to recognise.  It is already happening.  If a ready made framework for identifying the differences between significantly contributory input or fully participatory observation as opposed to effective sponsorship were available the problem would not arise.  To some extent such frameworks likely exist at the major level, examples being some major observatories, where institutional sponsorship and trust funding are acknowledged.  At the middle level it can be loosely followed as a recipient of time on say AAVSONET will acknowledge the data source to one of that network's telescopes.  However, both in that case and in the robotic telescope case in general, whether nonprofit or commercial, the potential exists for claims, if not demands, for 'credit' for scientific contribution to be strongly made where the claimant has done little if anything to warrant more than a sponsorship mention.

Cheers

John