Robotic Telescopes, Linux, and RTML

skintigh2 writes "Robotic telescopes controlled by Remote Telescope Markup Language and Linux scripts, along with stationary telescopes, are searching the skies and have made many findings: comets, hundreds of asteroids, 60,000 potential variable stars, and more. Will Linux save the Earth from a planet killer, or will we get crushed while the collected data goes unanalyzed? Read more to find out how you can help."

Comments

spinning mercury mirror

[justanyone]

There was a story a while back about amateurs in Canada building a telescope out of a circular spinning table with Mercury on it. The result was a not-very-pointable telescope with a way huge size for very little money. Of course, prolonged exposure to liquid mercury is dangerous to breathe near, but a simple facemask can help a bunch and this would potentially be outside or in an open-topped building anyway.

It seems to me that if the goal is a bunch of all-night observations of whatever piece of sky happens to be overhead, this might be a good telescope to use for that purpose. Superb light-gathering power, relatively cheap to build and operate, transportable, but with limited pointing capability.

I wonder who might be interested in setting up one and linking up the observations with these folks?

-- Kevin