Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) is a global network of astronomical telescopes located at sites around the world. LCO was founded in 2002 by Tim Brown, a professor of astrophysics at Clemson University, and its current director is Robert Zinn, also a professor of astrophysics at Clemson University. The telescopes in the LCO network are used for a variety of astronomical research projects, including studies of dark energy, extrasolar planets, and supernovae.
LCO operates a fleet of 20 robotic telescope units located at 11 sites on six continents. These include four 0.4-meter (16-inch) SBIG STX 16803 cameras, four 1-meter (40-inch) DFM Engineering telescoopes with Apogee U16M detectors, two 2-meter (6.5-foot) Faulkes Telescopes North and South operated by Liverpool John Moores University and Swansea University respectively, as well as the 10K Consortium Array located at McDonald Observatory which consists of eight 0.6-meter (24-inch) Celestron CPC 1100 Schmidt–Cassegrain telescopes. In addition to these ground-based facilities, LCO also has access to data from the Kepler spacecraft as part of the K2 mission.
LCO’s primary focus is on time-domain astronomy – that is, studying astronomical objects that change over time on short timescales such as hours or days. This includes phenomena such as supernovae and extrasolar planets transiting their host stars. Time domain astronomy is particularly well suited to robotic telescope networks like LCO because they can rapidly respond to events and collect large amounts of data very efficiently.
One recent example of this was the discovery of ASASSN-15lh – the most powerful supernova ever discovered. This event was first detected by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS–SN), one of several sky surveys that are regularly monitored by LCO using its global network of telescopes. Within 24 hours of receiving notification about ASASSN-15lh from ASAS–SN, LCO had collected more than 100 light curvesof the event – that is, graphs showing how bright it appeared to be over time – using its 0