Theme: Telescope operations and scheduling: from classical to autonomous
The STELLA robotic observatory
Since more then 15 years, the AIP operates two 1.2m telescopes, STELLA-1 for wide-field photometry and imaging and STELLA-2 which is equipped with a high-resolution spectrograph. Both telescopes and the facility itself operates in a fully unattended mode. As it was clear from the very beginning that STELLA will host two telescopes with rather different instrumentation, the software development was geared towards a generic framework, which is capable of operating basically any robotic or at least autonomous telescope. In this talk, I want to briefly summarize the steps undertaken to automate astronomical observations, then mainly highlight our successes and drawbacks experienced in optimizing dispatch-scheduling of individual observations to build up close-to best semester-long observing schedules.