The Burke-Gaffney Observatory, with its Ralph Medjuck Planewave CDK24 telescope, is a robot! It runs a suite of programs collectively called "Mission Control" which was developed by former observatory director Dave Lane.
It has a flexible and easy-to-use "chat-bot" style interface that allows observers to obtain astronomical images of objects of their choice in a fully-automatic way! Images taken can also be processed to make them look better and even in made into colour images!
You can "chat" with the observatory using:
- Twitter (public tweets or direct messages)
- Facebook Messenger
- Cell phone text messaging
- Communicator App
- (Coming soon) Mastodon
You can monitor its status, observations, and activities using:
- its databases-driven website
- its Public Messages feed
- its Twitter feed
- Communicator App
Observers need an observer account to use this service. Your submitted image requests will be automatically taken by the observatory and sent to you! At the present time we are fairly open on who will be allowed to use this free service. That may tighten up in future. Priority, however, is given to our students and local usage for educational and research purposes.
For information about how to obtain an observer account see the Getting Started page.