Enabling schools and public access to the Liverpool Robotic Telescope

Five per-cent of the observing time on the Liverpool Telescope (a 2-m robotic telescope sited in La Palma) will be set aside for public understanding of science. Schools access will be via. a queue scheduling mechanism, and public access via live Planetarium shows. We describe the development and performance of a generic Java message passing system to allow communication between the processes implementing the robotic control of the telescope and the remote processes that will be run at the Planetarium. We also describe an adaptive data compression algorithm to allow transfer of data back from the telescope in near real time and our software for Planetarium access which allows staff at the Planetarium to implement their own control, system and display software. Finally we describe our hierarchical web-based system for schools to input observation requests and the image processing software we have developed to allow them to make quantitative measurements of the resulting data.