Third Workshop on Robotic Autonomous Observatories

7-11 October 2013

The number of automatic astronomical facilities worldwide continues to grow, and the level of robotisation, autonomy, and networking is increasing as well. This has a strong impact in many astrophysical fields, like the search for extra-solar planets, the monitoring of variable stars in our Galaxy, the study of active galactic nuclei, the detection and monitoring of supernovae, and the immediate follow-up of high-energy transients such as gamma-ray bursts.

The main focus of the workshop will be on the new and existing astronomical facilities whose goal is to observe a wide variety of astrophysical targets with no (or very little) human interaction. The workshop will become an international forum for researchers to summarise the most recent developments and ideas in the field, with a special emphasis given to the technical and observational results and public outreach (including Citizen Science) and educational applications achieved within the last five years as well as the future strategies foreseen.

Topics

Existing robotic observatories worldwide	Scientific results obtained by means of robotic observatories
New hardware and software developments	Real-time analysis pipelines
Archiving the data	Telescope and observatory control systems
Transient detection and classification	Protocols for robotic telescope networks
Global networks	Educational applications
Future strategies	Public Outreach and Citizen Science