Abstract

Automated observatories are wonderful tools for collecting data. But once you have the data, you have to do something with it. Over the past two years, we have been conducting the Baker Observatory Subminute (BOS) Survey to search for short period phenomena. The BOS Survey uses a 0.4 m telescope with a Roper Scientific RS1340b CCD and no filter, located at Baker Observatory in southwest Missouri. We observe a 15' square field using exposure times of 2-20 seconds for four hour durations during two separate nights. We have developed software to process these data in a largely automated fashion. We have also implemented automated variability detection over a large range of timescales. For the shortest periods, we have found Fourier analysis to work well; for medium periods, we have tried several methods, including phase dispersion minimization; and we are even attempting to detect variability with timescales of days. However the biggest lesson we have learned is that data consistency is the most important component in recovering variability data.