Related papers: Autonomous software: Myth or magic?
Modern astronomical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) promise an unprecedented wealth of discoveries, delivered in the form of ~10 million alerts of time-variable events per night. Astronomers are faced with the daunting…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
The successful prediction of lensing events is a new and exciting enterprise that provides opportunities to discover and study planetary systems. The companion paper investigates the underlying theory. This paper is devoted to outlining the…
During the months when the galactic bulge is visible from the southern hemisphere, there are typically about 8 to 10 on-going microlensing events at any given time. If the lensing stars have planets around them, then the signature of the…
Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…
The impact of autonomous systems on astrophysics can be just as revolutionary as in our daily lives. This paper includes the following so that the astrophysics community can realize the benefits of autonomous systems: description of…
The Monitor project is a large-scale program of photometric and spectroscopic monitoring of young open clusters using telescopes at ESO and other observatories. Its primary goal is to detect and characterise new low-mass eclipsing binaries,…
The STAR architecture was designed to test the value of the full Selective Tuning model of visual attention for complex real-world visuospatial tasks and behaviors. However, knowledge of how humans solve such tasks in 3D as active observers…
MEDEA is a software architecture to detect luminosity variations connected with the discovery of new planet outside the Solar System. Taking into account the enormous number of stars to monitor for our aim traditional approaches are very…
Microlensing light curves are now being monitored with the precision required to detect small perturbations due to planetary companions of the primary lens. Microlensing is complementary to other planetary search techniques in its potential…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
Robo-AO is the first astronomical laser guide star adaptive optics (AO) system designed to operate completely independent of human supervision. A single computer commands the AO system, the laser guide star, visible and near-infrared…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
We summarize the status of a computer simulator for microlens planet surveys. The simulator generates synthetic light curves of microlensing events observed with specified networks of telescopes over specified periods of time. Particular…
In the companion paper we began the task of systematically studying the detection of planets in wide orbits ($a > 1.5 R_E$) via microlensing surveys. In this paper we continue, focusing on repeating events. We find that, if all planetary…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Estimating the number of microlensing events observed in different parts of the Galactic bulge is a crucial point in planning microlensing experiments. Reliable estimates are especially important if observing resources are scarce, as is the…
The automated detection of solar features is a technique which is relatively underused but if we are to keep up with the flow of data from spacecraft such as the recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, then such techniques will be…
A few percent of all stars are variable, yet over 90% of variables brighter than 12 magnitude have not been discovered yet. There is a need for an all sky search and for the early detection of any unexpected events: optical flashes from…
The Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) is a worldwide collaboration of astronomers using semi-dedicated European, South African, and Australian telescopes to perform continuous, rapid and precise multi-band CCD photometric…