Automatic Photoelectric Telescope

Abstract

Differential photoelectric photometry by its very nature is a repetitious task that seems to have an inherent affinity for digital computers. It was during the 1950's that Stewart Sharpless and others used digital computers to reduce photoelectric data, and the Pierce photometer at the Flower and Cook Observatory logged data in a digital format ready for analysis. While these early efforts are certainly of interest, we will be concerned in this introductory section only with ground-based optical telescopes used to make automatic photoelectric observations. We will limit our concern to those telescopes that were dedicated to photometry and had photometers that were used not only for the measurements per se but also as an aid to acquiring and centering the stars to be observed.