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Enabling Virtual Access to Latin-America Southern Observatories

FP7 Capabilities

2011/02/28-03/03 Telescopes from Afar, Hawaii (US)

EVALSO was mentioned in an invited talk on Rapid response to transient events by Fernando Comeron (ESO) at the conference Telescopes from Afar, organized by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation in Hawaii from 28 February to 3 March 2011.

Abstract: Rapid Response to transient events at the VLT (paper, presentation)

The ESO Vey Large Telescope (VLT) has been offering for the last eight years a Rapid Response Mode that allows authorized users to automatically trigger follow-up observations of transient phenomena. The delay between the reception of the trigger and the beginning of the science exposure is no more than a few minutes, similar to that of robotic telescopes. However, the sheer size of the VLT Unit Telescopes and the variety of its instrumentation have opened up new scientific fields where the Rapid Response capability has made a decisive difference. The mechanics of the Rapid Response Mode will be described, as well as some perspectives for its future implementation at the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Operational possibilities to be enabled by a new large bandwidth link between the observatory and Europe, currently undergoing commissioning, will allow in the future near-real time interactivity between the facility and observers located in another continent, leading to the full exploitation of the Rapid Response Mode.