Two state-of-the-art telescopes will soon join SF State’s scientific repertoire, each capable of being controlled with a computer from miles away, according to project members in the astronomy department.

The first, the Automated Planet Finder, is nearing completion at the Lick Observatory site atop Mount Hamilton.

When finished later this year, the Planet Finder will be the world’s first telescope dedicated solely to finding planets orbiting other stars, according to SF State lecturer and astronomer Chris McCarthy, 39.

The second project, still on the drawing board, will allow astronomy students at SF State to control a faraway robotic observatory with their home computers, said designer Tim Brothers.

“It’s very foggy here,” Brothers said of SF State’s current observatory. “It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.”

Some in the astronomy community jokingly call the Thornton Hall observatory the “SOUFA,” or “Stonestown Observatory for Ultra-Foggy Astronomy.” Brothers said that his proposed robotic telescope will allow busy undergraduates to take advantage of the “crisper and clearer” viewing from a remote mountaintop without having to travel there themselves.

Currently, the research-grade 16-inch telescope at SF State uses a computerized mounting system that can automatically track objects in the night sky, a small-scale version of what Brothers intends for his remote observatory. While San Francisco’s fog can actually help improve “seeing” by smothering the city light around campus, most serious SF State research is done elsewhere.

Some of that research includes the 1995 spotting of “extra-solar planets,” making SF State researchers the second worldwide to discover planets far away from Earth. In the following years, university astronomer Debra Fischer and her team helped to refine planet-finding methods and grow the school’s reputation for charting the hard-to-detect objects, said McCarthy, Fischer’s research partner.

With the Automated Planet Finder, the relatively repetitive task will be passed on to a computer program that can search every night for new planets. Researchers will still set the agenda, but discoveries are expected to increase with the mechanization of the job, McCarthy said.

Instead of searching for dimly-lit planets directly, astronomers at SF State look for telltale “wobbles” in remote stars. When a star is found to move in a predictable way, those wobbles can be analyzed as the gentile gravitational nudge of orbiting planets.

“We’ve been observing some for 12, even 20 years now,” McCarthy said. “It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

While a human astronomer can easily tell if the weather is safe enough to deploy the telescope, researchers will rely on an array of sensors to automatically judge the conditions. If one sensor fails, the whole observatory could be at risk.

The Automated Planet Finder is expected to open for business at Lick Observatory later this year, and Brothers said he expects to decide on a location for his project and for construction to begin by this spring. Currently, sites on Mount Hamilton, Mount Tamalpais and in New Mexico are among those being considered.