The first robotic telescope of Vladimir Lipunov's group stood in a village called Vostryakovo, in the garden of his friend Sasha Krylov. They mixed the concrete themselves. Then the telescope looked through the smoke drifting from a neighbour's banya and saw an explosion at redshift 3.5, from a time when the universe was half its present age.
Lipunov is an astrophysicist who has spent about twenty years building MASTER, a network of robotic telescopes. What he saw through that smoke was not a rare stroke of luck. It was what the machine was built for. And it points at something odd about the telescopes everyone knows.
The pictures that fill the news come from the Space Telescope and the Webb. Lipunov's point is that these are the wrong tools for catching an explosion in the act. Their field of view is a keyhole, about 10,000 times smaller than the one on his telescopes. So the sudden things in the sky, the ones that flare and fade, mostly happen somewhere else.
The great telescopes everyone looks at photographs from, the Space Telescope and the Webb, have a field of view 10,000 times smaller than ours.
А эти великие телескопы, о которых все смотрят фотографии, Space телескоп, Web телескоп, это все телескопы с таким полем зрения, в 10 тысяч раз меньше нашего.
— Vladimir Lipunov, Osnova, 36:36
Think about the job. An explosion gives you a few tens of seconds to point and shoot. A satellite or a neutrino detector at the South Pole sends a patch of sky where the thing should be, and the patch is often large. Lipunov puts it flatly: even then you get several square degrees to search. A narrow telescope would have to guess. A wide one just goes there.
Hence the design. Two parallel tubes, one red and one blue, shoot at once. The robot holds the whole astronomical catalogue in memory, compares each new frame with what the sky looked like twenty years ago, and announces a new star. When the patch is bigger than the field of view, it sweeps the sky "like a tractor sowing a field", as Lipunov puts it.
The other half is the network: nine or ten telescopes on almost every continent, so that, in his words, it is an empire over which the stars never set. One night's sweep began with a frame taken 67 seconds after a collapse began. For another burst, they were by pure chance already filming the spot 200 seconds before the black hole formed.
The record he cares about is the "Galilean" burst, bright enough that Galileo's 35 to 40 millimetre telescope would have shown it. By Lipunov's count humanity has seen four of them. A burst in 2008 reached fifth magnitude, bright enough that a shepherd in the fifth millennium BC could have seen it with his eyes, had he looked up at the right seconds. Webb and Hubble, Lipunov says, can wander the sky all their lives. So far, they have not found a single burst.
Other groups build the same way. A July 2024 paper on arXiv by Martin Dyer describes GOTO, a network of robotic mounts in La Palma and at Siding Spring in Australia. It takes in 88 square degrees at once and reacts within a minute. A December 2024 arXiv paper by Rahul Gupta and colleagues credits MASTER, Lipunov's own network, and the BOOTES network with the afterglow of burst GRB 230204B, seen from about 1.3 kiloseconds, roughly 22 minutes, after it went off.
Lipunov's telescopes often arrive first, with only an approximate address from space. Then the great telescopes turn up. They are good at what they do. They simply cannot find the spot themselves.
