Steve:
It may be of passing interest for some to know that Gamma Ray Burst
Transients are responsible for SBIG's existence. You might mention it in
the historical accounts <g>. I've told this story before, but it might be
interesting for some of the newer folks. Before there was an SBIG there
was an SBAG, Santa Barbara Astronomy Group which was an all volunteer group
started up by Richard Schwartz in the 1980's (Sky & Telescope, December,
1986, p.560).
Rather than trying to capture the afterglow, we were looking to capture a
burst at it happened. Very little was known back then about GRBs and it
was thought that bursts might repeat. We were working with Bradley
Schaefer of the Laboratory for High Energy Aastrophysics, NASA/Goddard
Space Flight Center. We'd received known error boxes from the most recent
satellite data and our job was to monitor these error boxes all night long
for as many nights as we could manage waiting for a repeat. We used
photometers (cooled CCD cameras were not readily available to amateurs at
the time) coupled to a trigger device which would download a light curve
and open the shutter on a camera if there were a sudden brightening in the
box. We had to obvserve in pairs separated by some miles so that we could
rule out local and atmospheric phenomena in the event of a trigger (The
Perseus Flasher and Satellite Glints, The Astrophysical Journal,
320:398-404, 1987 September 1). Since we all had real lives, too, we
couldn't stay up all night doing this so we had to devise some way of
keeping the telescope tracking accurately enough that we could leave it
unattended for the entire night. The ST-1, ST-2 and ST-3 were the results
of Alan Holmes' efforts to make a tracker for our own research. Almost all
of the development and field testing were done at my observatory. When it
got to the level of refinement of the ST-4, several of us (Richard
Schwartz, Alan Holmes, Matt Longmire, Jack Brooks and Michael Barber)
founded SBIG to make the device available commercially. We (Richard and
one employee) began packing ST-4s and shipping them from a spare room next
to Richard's garage <G>. The ST-4 worked out so well we made the ST-6,
then the ST-7,8 etc.
If it weren't for Gamma Ray Bursts there wouldn't be an SBIG.
Regards,
Michael Barber
SBIG
