Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2016
The USNO (Flagstaff Station) is in the process of modernizing its 8-inch transit telescope. The upgraded instrument will use a CCD detector to measure the positions of both bright and faint stars directly with respect to extragalactic sources. Moreover, it will be able to observe large numbers of stars very rapidly, and improvements in accuracy are expected with further upgrades (e.g. CCD circle scanners, an interferometric telescope monitoring system, networks of environmental sensors). Many research opportunities related to coordinate systems exist for this telescope.