MODERNIZATION OF COLOTI OPTICAL OBSERVATORY: REMOTE CONTROL AND AUTOMATION FOR MULTIMESSENGER FOLLOW-UP

In 2017 two cosmic events led us into the multimessenger astronomy era: the gravitational wave event GW 170817 (detected by both LIGO and VIRGO) with electromagnetic counterpart in the whole spectrum on one side, and the cosmic neutrino IC 170922A (detected by IceCube) associated to a blazar flar on the other side, both also seen by Fermi-LAT in the gamma-ray band. This proved that the study of transient multimessenger events needs synergy between space-borne and ground-based telescopes or detectors. The goal of this project is to contribute to the understanding of multimessenger events by restoring the Coloti Observatory, enabling remote control and automation: develop observation strategies, data acquisition system and image analysis pipeline. The mandatory step is a hardware upgrade, and with it a software renewal is necessary too. All the objects of the observatory will be connected to each other in an Internet of Things via a protocol of Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPCUA). The control programs for each object is written in JAVA, from the low-level serial communications to the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The OPCUA protocol enables complete customization and flexible remote control of each object. In the next future the automation will be easily implemented in the new software, and it will consist of automatic search for targets to monitor and automatic response to multimessenger event alerts.