Located at Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton, just east of San Jose, California, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) is an entirely robotic telescope dedicated to the search for supernovae and the monitoring of celestial objects. It is a 76 cm diameter reflecting telescope equipped with a CCD camera and automatic guider.

The KAIT project is led by Professor Alex Filippenko of the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department. Dr. Richard Treffers (formerly of UC Berkeley) and Professor Michael Richmond (currently at the Rochester Institute of Technology) also devoted several years of effort, and Dr. Weidong Li spent 14 years running KAIT (1997-2011). Dr. WeiKang Zheng is now in charge of KAIT nightly operations, assisted by Dr. Thomas Brink. Over the years, more than 100 UC Berkeley undergraduate students have been involved with KAIT. Current undergraduate team members include Andrew Bigley, Sanyum Channa, Nick Choksi, Maxime de Kouchkovski, Goni Halevi, Andrew Halle, Sahana Kumar, Sara Lopez, Jeff Molloy, Andrew Richter, Timothy Ross, Samantha Stegman, Haynes Stephens, and Sameen Yunus.

For a description of the prototype instrument, see Richmond, Treffers, and Filippenko (1993), Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 105, 1164-1174. For a more recent description of KAIT and its supernova search, see Filippenko (2001), in Small-Telescope Astronomy on Global Scales, ed. W. P. Chen, C. Lemme, and B. Paczynski (San Francisco: Astron. Soc. Pacific, Conf. Ser. Vol. 246), 121-130. Lists of press releases and KAIT papers are given below.

Major funding for KAIT was provided to Filippenko by the National Science Foundation, AutoScope Corporation, Photometrics Ltd., Sun Microsystems, the Hewlett-Packard Company, Lick Observatory, and the University of California. Completion of the telescope was made possible by a generous donation from the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation. Current funding for KAIT research is provide by the Katzman Foundation, the TABASGO Foundation, NSF, and NASA.

KAIT Highlights:

• Old KAIT news .
• A new AP7 CCD camera is installed in KAIT. New software to control the camera is compiled and tested. With the new camera KAIT can go as deep as just 19 magnitude in 20 second exposures. KAIT is now observing with 30 seconds (with limiting magnitude about 19.5 mag) and has an efficiency of 70 images/hour. --08/01/98
• Dome tolerance angle is added to the observation software so it further improves the efficiency of KAIT -- now at 80-90 images/hour. --08/26/98
• KAIT discovered a comet in the evening of the Christmas day! --12/25/98
• The four epoch color images of SN 1998dh appeared in the Dec, 1998 issue of the "Science" magzine (vol. 282, page 2156).
• "Catch as KAIT Can" -- a news note about the KAIT project appeared in the Jan, 1999 issue of the "Sky and Telescope" magzine (page 26).
• KAIT discovered another comet! This is amazing considering the small field of view of the KAIT camera.
• We have received a generous donation from Hewlett-Packard to help improve the computing power of the project, which includes two HP Kayak XA-s workstations with dual processors, CD writers, printers and DAT tape drives. Both computers have been successfully hooked up for Linux. For the first time the image processing is ahead of the observations!
• We are now officially collaborating with Michael Schwartz of the Tenagra Observatories. The official name for the collaboration is the Lick Observatory and the Tenagra Observatory Supernova Searches (LOTOSS) . The first SN from LOTOSS, SN 2000dx, was discovered by Michael Schwartz, using the 0.5m Tenagra III automated telescope.
• SN 2001E marks the 100th SN discovery of KAIT. With 1 SN discovery in year 1997, 20 in year 1998, 40 in year 1999, 36 in year 2000, and 3 so far in year 2001, the total number of KAIT SN discoveries reaches 100 on Jan 6, 2001.
• KAIT responded to Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) 021211 at real time, and caught the GRB at 108 sec after the burst. Sequences of images were obtained with KAIT, which yield the best early-time light curve ever observed for a GRB. See above link for a press release on the KAIT observations of GRB 021211.
• KAIT observations of GRB 020813
• KAIT discovered a very young type Ia SN 2012cg, automatically triggered multi-band follow-up observations only 5 minutes after the discovery image was taken.
• KAIT discovered a very young type Ia SN 2013dy, first detection at merely ~2.4hr after the explosion (/firt light time).
• KAIT pre-discovery detection of SN 2014J in M82
• KAIT discovered a bright type Ia supernova SN 2016coj, the brightest SN of the year 2016.
• KAIT monitoring of the very young Type IIb SN 2016gkg