DOT external usage

Since January 2008 we are no longer funded to operate the DOT in the service-mode fashion in which the telescope was used before then, with Dr. P. Sütterlin acting as principal DOT observer on a a daily basis also when the telescope was used for external campaigns.  Since January 2008, Dr. Sütterlin is employed at the SST instead of the DOT.  Also, in January 2008, Ir. F.C.M. Bettonvil moved onward to EST design studies, in 2011 to nighttime telescope technology.  Furthermore, software engineer G. Sliepen moved to the SST group in early 2011.  This loss of manpower funding implies that there is no longer a DOT observer, nor somebody to handle the elaborate speckle processing and alignment processing that contributes much to the high quality of DOT image sequences.

External DOT usage is therefore necessarily in external-user mode, in which a user is responsible for telescope targeting, data acquisition, and speckle processing with the DOT Speckle Processor.  These tasks are far from trivial and require a capable on-site observer.  In addition, we no longer have funding for DOT operation costs.  We therefore invite potential DOT users to supply funding for DOT operation including manpower to handle the observing, speckle reconstruction, and alignment processing.  The return consists of DOT observing time.  Enquiries: email R.J.Rutten at uu.nl and R.H.Hammerschlag at uu.nl.

In 2008 and 2009, respectively, Santiago Vargas Dominguez and Vyacheslav Olshevsky worked as DOT observer on EC funding that then terminated.  During 2010 the DOT was entered into a formal partnership with Helio Research (USA), which funded the DOT operation with a grant from the US National Science Foundation. Helio Research provided the operation cost and the manpower for the DOT observing and data processing.