Research is proposed to improve the performance and to automate telescopes. Improvements will consist of simplifying the drives and the structure and developing techniques ot' fabrication to reduce the labor hours. Mechanical complexity will be reduced by replacing many of the traditional parts with electronic and software complexity. These same changes will allow the telescope to be automated reducing the expenses of having the astronomer on site, and will reduce the nonproductive time caused by inefficient operation. The telescope size has been chosen at 0.8 M because this size requires the performance and attributes of larger telescopes, but the expense of' the electronics is nearly the same for the 0.8 M as for larger sized telescopes. This makes the cost of the electronics a large percentage of the 0.8 M total expense. Cost reductions in this area will have a major impact on the overall cost of the telescope system.The potential commercial application as described by the awardee: The research will provide a high performance, low cost automated telescope system for astronomical use, which will allow economical data gathering of much-needed basic astronomical data.
