Title:  The Lick Observatory Supernova Search with the Katzman 
        Automatic Imaging Telescope, and Studies of Nearby Supernovae
                    

Alex Filippenko
University of California at Berkeley


Abstract:

  The Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at Lick Observatory is a fully
robotic 0.76-m reflector equipped with a CCD imaging camera.  Its telescope
control system checks the weather, opens the dome, points to the desired
objects, finds and acquires guide stars, exposes, stores the data, and
manipulates the data without human intervention. One of our main goals is to
discover nearby supernovae, to be used for a variety of studies (such as
establishing the comparison sample for supernovae at high redshifts). KAIT is
currently the world's most successful search engine for nearby supernovae,
having discovered about 80 of them in 2002 alone (see
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~bait/kait.html). I will describe the telescope, the
supernova search, and some of the followup studies that we have conducted.