DOT external usage

Since January 2008 there is no funding to operate the DOT in the service-mode fashion in which the telescope was used before.  There is no longer a DOT observer, nor manpower to handle the elaborate speckle processing and alignment processing that contributed 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 data reduction including speckle processing.  These tasks are far from trivial and require at least 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 sufficient 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 astro-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.

Since then the DOT is mothballed but ready to observe upon renewed funding.