Cognitive Telescope Network

Telescopic follow-up of transient astronomical events is one of the most desirable and scientifically useful activities in modern observational astronomy. From a scientific perspective, pinpointing a transient event can be essential for discovering more about the source, either by directing more powerful telescopes to observe, or to maintain a near continuous record of observations as the transient evolves. Very often transients are poorly localized on the sky and telescopes have a limited field of view thus pin-pointing the transient source is often a daunting task. Perhaps most importantly, the number of large telescopes on the planet is small, and they cannot be commandeered to randomly search for every transient of interest.

Modern sub-meter class telescopes, of the sort often owned by universities and increasingly by amateurs, if properly directed, could play an important role in enabling transient follow-up. Modern technology gives them the ability to be automated and controlled remotely and to make useful imaging observations that will enable follow-up work by other, larger telescopes. The Cognitive Telescope Network (CTN) will be a framework that takes notifications of transient events and intelligently instructs a network of sub-meter telescopes mapped into a grid and observe a large region of the sky that likely contains the transient event, based on the geolocation, weather and properties of the individual telescopes. The goal of CTN is to collect the data from this network of small telescopes, evaluate and classify that data to identify the most likely candidates for the transient being hunted and deliver the results to the astronomer community for further analysis by larger telescopes for directed and focused observations.

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