JISC

Many institutes and nations worldwide own and operate astronomical telescopes to carry out both research and teaching. However, each telescope is a bespoke system and is generally not useable by those "outside the club". This makes carrying out many kinds of astronomical observations difficult, as cross-telescope cooperation and scheduling is hard to arrange both politically and technologically.   I will describe how we have used e-Science technologies to start to break down both the political and technological barriers to collaboration between telescopes.   The model uses software agents to represent both data providers and users and has a number of XML dialects to describe both the nature of astronomical events themselves and observing requests to follow-up those events.  An implementation of the model on a number of telescopes has allowed the formation of the "Heterogeeous Telescopes Network" which has succeeded in enabling new, high-impact research in the areas of Gamma-Ray bursts and extra-solar planet detection that would have been very difficult to achieve with conventional methods.