Is it just me or does it seem easier than ever to be an astronomer? There was a time, if you wanted to use a telescope like the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (pictured above) you'd have to travel to Chile and brave the elements to get to its mountaintop perch. Opening the roof to let the telescope poke through also let the cold come in (current weather conditions here). Heat? Please! You don't want to distort the path of the photons heading into the lens.

The days of photographic plates are gone. Now astronomers can view from afar--in fact they can live regular daytime hours like the rest of us if they want! Unfortunately, as life gets better, technology is making the astronomer less important in deciding where the telescope will gaze.

"On the night of February 6, 2006, Los Alamos astrophysicist Przemek Wozniak was awakened by a cell-phone call from RAPTOR, the small robotic optical telescope array on Fenton Hill, about 30 miles from Los Alamos in northern New Mexico's Jemez Mountains. RAPTOR had found something strange--a rapidly rising light signal coming from the position of a very short gamma-ray burst detected and located. These bursts announce the birth of stellar-size black holes and are the most powerful events since the Big Bang." - Los Alamos National Lab release

NASA finds the gamma-ray bursts with the help of a satellite, but the bursts only last a few minutes. Developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory the ROTSE-I (Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment-I) telescope had been able to hone in on a burst in ten seconds, faster than mere mortals can react... if they would have reacted at all. People have a tendency to discount things that are anomalous or happen infrequently. And since ROTSE-I's replacement RAPTOR has cut the time to eight seconds there's even less time for error, or thought.

"If humans had been in the loop they would have said, as we did, 'Gamma-ray bursts don't act like that. Forget it. And RAPTOR wouldn't have found anything." - Tom Vestrand, Space and Atmospheric Sciences

We're not done yet. RAPTOR will soon be replaced by RAPTOR-K with better optics and more processing power. It won't be necessary to wait for a satellite signal to search for gamma-ray bursts. RAPTOP-K will just keep an eye-on-the-sky bringing in tens of thousands of images a night, or about a terrabyte of data per week--analyzing it almost instantaneously. But what will make this a game changer is its ability to scan, compare it with a database and mine for ongoing gamma-bursts autonomously without the need for human help. It is astronomy without the astronomer!