Monitoring the variable stellar Universe

Stellar variability is ubiquitous and a powerful diagnostic for physical processes underpinning the make-up and behaviour of stars, and the interaction with their environment. The systematic investigation of time-dependent phenomena continues to be a major driver of new ground- and space-based facilities, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and ESA's cornerstone Gaia mission. Yet we are quite some way from a round-the-clock all-sky monitoring down to sufficiently faint magnitudes and with high time resolution to capture the full spectrum of time variability in the stellar Universe. Much of the current effort relies therefore on the availability of robotic telescopes that can dedicate significant observing hours to the photometric follow-up of individual sources or fields.
In Spring 2016 the Open University is commissioning a new twin facility at the Observatorio del Teide (OT), Tenerife, Canary Islands, one of the prime northern hemisphere observatory sites, building on the expertise gained with the OU's highly successful PIRATE Facility (pirate.open.ac.uk) and the Bradford Robotic Telescope (telescope.org).