Langton Robotic Telescope providing wide access to a 16 inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope via the web for schools and the public.

We aim to make a facility so that students and the public can observe on all clear nights using our telescope. Each year we have about 1000 vistors for Stargazing Live and about a 1000 for our public observing sessions on the first Friday of every winter month. There is such an appetite to look at the stars and my students suggested we devise a system similar to the Faulkes system where the public can use the telescope much more often. We sought advice from Andy Newsam who supported the students and we initially thought we would need to buy some software to set up the system. However the students set to work programming a whole new sytem which works. What we then needed was a good camera system so that the public can take high quality pictures. The RAS gave us half of the money so we need the other half to purchase the CCD. Many schools come up to observe and some ask about taking images for their GCSE astronomy coursework - we can make this accessible to them with the camera.
We think this is a new approach. It doesn't quite have the scale of the Faulkes Telescope Project but it might establish a precedent that other observatories could follow. The local astronomy society, South East Kent Astronomical Society is very keen to help promote this as a way to encourage people to start observing from the comfort of their own home. We will give the project wide publicity across Kent and note by hits on the website the take up more widely - http://obs-server.thelangton.org.uk/

We will widely publicise this new facility in the local press, on Radio Kent and through the Langton Star Centre website. We are aware of many of the schools locally who offer GCSE astronomy and will inform them. We have a large network of schools we work with locally, across the South East and nationally and we work with a number of astronomical societies. We will attempt to get wider coverage if the uptake is not sufficient from these contacts. We are planning to have a weather reading added to the site so people from further afield can see what the weather is but the system will not open if the weather is poor. We are aiming to get coverage by social media and update information by having a picture of the week. We hope to feature in publications such as RAS Astronomy and Geophysics, the IOP Classroom Physics and regional newsletters of the ASE. There is already huge interest in public observing in Kent and we hope to extend and enhance this. We hope some of the time will be used by a community of school students locally for doing research. There are a number of local schools and university students who attend regularly. This development could be supported by academics at the University of Kent. We recently welcomed Dr Stephen Lowry from the University of Kent and he was very interested and supportive of what we are doing.