| Georgia State University's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array is located atop California's Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles. Approximately 2000 miles due west of the university's central campus, located in Atlanta Georgia, travel time to/from the array is generally several hours by air and ground for those individuals visiting the array who do not live in southern California. In Internet time, however, the array is a mere 60 milliseconds (ms) distance from Atlanta!; A remote operations system allowing multiple individuals to participate in remote observation sessions was designed and implemented. Several technological considerations were incorporated into the overall design including a secure network infrastructure with acceptable end-to-end latency, a control room replete with appropriate computing and projection systems, an efficient client-server model, and a data archival system.; The remote operations system was initially used to begin a prototypical survey of extra-solar planetary systems, establish operational procedures, and define performance expectations. The observations, comprised of the target/calibrator star pairs 51 Peg/HD 218792 and &egr; Eri/HD 21530, involved the sampling of several baseline-visibility data points collected over the course of several hours per evening per star. The downloaded scientific data were reduced and analyzed thus yielding the results contained herein.; Although independent of the local weather, remote operations have practical considerations such as routine preparations requiring on-site personnel and observation of astronomical targets with celestial coordinates appropriate to the Local Sidereal Time (LST) and U-V plane coverage of the array. Such considerations are necessary in order to obtain desired scientific data. This present work details all of the aforementioned topics that were required to produce the first-generation of the remote operations system. |
