The Perugia University Automatic Observatory

In this paper we describe the hardware and software architecture of the Automatic Imaging Telescope (AIT), recently developed at the Perugia University Observatory. II is based an an existing 0.4-m telescope which was transformed into an automatic device. During the night, all the observatory functions are controlled by two PCs in an unattended mode. The system is equipped with an autoguider and the software was designed to allow the automatic reduction of the data at the end of the night. Since 1994 October the AIT has been collecting a large amount of BVR(c)I(c) data for about 30 blazars.