2 BOOTES: The concept

2.1 The Wide Field Cameras

Commercial 50-mm wide-field lenses (Nikkor, Japan) are used, attached to two ST8 CCD cameras (Santa Barbara Instruments Group, USA). This resembles the Optical Transient Monitor (OTM) that is in operation at the Astronomical Institute in Ondrejov. Each pair of the BOOTES wide-field cameras is mounted atop a 0.3-m LX 200 Meade telescope (Meade, USA), allowing long integrations of a previously selected region. The four cameras monitor the same region of the sky, both in the I and V-bands. The typical limiting magnitude is V $\sim$ 12 for an integration time of 30 s, and V $\sim$ 14 for 300 s (see Table 1).

The first observing station (named BOOTES-1) is located at El Arenosillo (Huelva), a dark-sky site in Spain owned by the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial (INTA). The other set will be placed at the Estación Experimental de La Mayora (Málaga), 240 km apart. The latter is run by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC).

  

Table 1: Features of the BOOTES Wide Field Cameras

The Wide Field Cameras make use of the Photomate 20 Signal Processor Board (Daimler-Benz Aerospace, Germany) which consists of two processors (see Bernas et al. 1998). The system is operated by commercial PCs. It is planned to work most of the time as discussed in Castro-Tirado et al. (1996), allowing to discriminate against flashing objects closer than one million kms thus ruling out satellite glints and other atmospheric and near-Earth events.

When information on a GRB position is obtained from the GCN (the GRB Coordinates Network, Barthelmy et al. 1998), the corresponding GRB error box is imaged by the cameras.

2.2 The Robotic Telescope

The Robotic Telescope is based on the Burst Alert Robotic Telescope (BART), that uses commercially available hardware components (Soldan et al. 1998). It is expected that the robotic telescope will perform rapid follow-up observations of events detected by BATSE, BeppoSAX, RossiXTE and future GRB detectors. The BOOTES telescope should be able to slew immediately and take deep frames at the GRB positions. Selected objects (variable stars, nearby galaxies, bright QSOs, etc.) will be regularly monitored, searching for flaring behaviour. The first telescope unit is already placed at the BOOTES-1 station, under a special enclosure which is opened automatically, according to weather conditions. The main features are shown in Table 2.

  

Table 2: Features of the BOOTES Robotic Telescope