flux of events?

[Rob Seaman]

Hola,

As those who attended the Hotwired workshop will know, I've been  
working on a demonstration robotic telescope.  This is really just a  
single component in a larger autonomous system.  The first hurdle was  
mechanical.  A little tinkering with gear boxes will tighten up the  
motions of the telescope.  The next will be software.  So far I'm  
very pleased with the new Java environment compared to the native  
LabVIEW-based language.  After that is systems engineering to get  
multiple components talking to each other.

The really hard part is developing curriculum.  This is intended to  
be used for outreach of various sorts as well as to try out different  
autonomous strategies.  As I consider what information it is I want  
to convey, it has occurred to me that I don't have a good holistic  
sense for what our transient universe looks like.

For instance, what is our best estimate of the hourly (or daily or  
monthly) flux for different classes of objects throughout the  
universe?  Supernovae are something like 10^2 per hour, right?  These  
would have an isotropic distribution on the sky, correct?  Other  
phenomena will align with the galactic plane or ecliptic, of course.   
What about the rates for GRBs?  How about events local to the Milky  
Way?  Solar system?  Classes of variable stars - prevalence and  
detectability?  Etc and so forth.  Pointers to papers and web sites  
would be delightful.

Alasdair - did you take a picture of la machine?

Rob