Continued Monitoring of LMXBs with the Faulkes Telescopes

Abstract

The Faulkes Telescope Project is an educational and research arm of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN). It has two 2-metre robotic telescopes, located at Haleakala on Maui (FT North) and Siding Spring in Australia (FT South). It is planned for these telescopes to be complemented by a research network of eighteen 1-metre telescopes, along with an educational network of twenty-eight 0.4-metre telescopes, providing 24 hour coverage of both northern and southern hemispheres. We have been conducting a monitoring project of 13 low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) using FT North since early 2006. The introduction of FT South has allowed us to extend this to monitor a total of 30 LMXBs. New instrumentation will allow us to expand this project to include both infrared wavelengths (z and y band) and spectroscopy. Brighter targets (~ 16 - 18 mag.) are imaged weekly in V, R and i' band (SNR ~ 50), while fainter ones (> 18 mag.) are observed only in i' band (SNR ~ 20). We alter this cadence in response to our own analysis or Astronomers Telegrams (ATels).

arXiv comment5 pages, 3 figures, conference proceedings from 'VII Microquasar Workshop: Microquasars and Beyond, held at Foca, Turkey, September 1st - 5th, 2008

References in corpus (1)

• Global optical/infrared - X-ray correlations in X-ray binaries: quantifying disc and jet contributions

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• Robotic Astronomy with the Faulkes Telescopes and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope
• The Accretion-Ejection Connection in the Black Hole X-ray Binary MAXI J1820$+$070