We report the discovery of three new star clusters in the halo of the Local Group dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822. These clusters were found in the deep images taken with the MegaPrime at the CFHT covering a total field of 2 deg $\times$ 2 deg. The most remote cluster is found to be located as far as 79 arcmin away from the center of NGC 6822. This distance is several times larger than the size of the region in NGC 6822 where star clusters were previously found. Morphological structures of the clusters and color-magnitude diagrams of the resolved stars in the clusters show that at least two of these clusters are proabably old globular clusters.

Korea Astronomy Observatory (KAO) is working to rebuild a 1.0-m robotic telescope in collaboration with a company (Astronomical Consultants & Equipment, Inc. or ACE). The telescope is being totally refurbished to make a fully automatic telescope which can operate in both interactive an fully autonomous robotic modes. This paper describes the design concepts and the work completed. The telescope is an f/7.5 Ritchey-Chretien system mounted on an equatorial fork with friction drives capable of high slewing (5°/s2) and high resolution tracking. The control software manages the entire telescope, instruments and observatory. In interactive local and remote modes the observer can manually enter coordinates or retrieve them from a database. In robotic mode the telescope controller downloads requests from users and creates a schedule. The telescope will be equipped with a CCD camera and will be available over the internet.

The Far-ultraviolet IMaging Spectrograph (FIMS) is a small spectrograph optimized for the observations of diffuse hot interstellar medium in far-ultraviolet wavebands (900–1150Å and 1335–1750Å). The instrument is expected to be sensitive to emission line fluxes an order of magnitude fainter than any previous missions. FIMS is currently under development and is scheduled for launch in 2002.

In 2000, Korea Astronomy Observatory launched the Near-Earth Object Patrol (NEOPAT) program. NEOPAT has conducted follow-up observations of NEOCP (NEO Confirmation Page) objects and discovered 52 new main-belt asteroids during the observation runs. We initiated collaboration with the Yonsei Survey Telescopes for Astronomical Research (YSTAR) team for NEO search. Wide-field of view, fast read-out time, and fully autonomous data pipeline will enable us to detect and track NEOs with a high efficiency. Scheduled to begin active operations in mid-2001, our survey system is going to be the first network of robotic telescopes for NEO search with automatic access to both hemispheres.

We describe ACE FlexGrid, a telescope flexure and pointing model based on an empirical grid of reference points. This software is valid for all types of telescopes and is especially suited to robotic telescopes which repeatedly observe the same object.

The BVR CCD observations of W UMa-type eclipsing binary SS Arietis were made for ten nights from November 1996 to December 1996 at the Sobaeksan Astronomy Observatory. From the observed light curves, nine new times of minimum lights were derived from the Kwee and van Woerden’s method. Improved light elements for this system were determined from these minimum lights with all the published minima. The analysis of the times of minima of SS Ari confirms that the orbital period of SS Ari has been suffering from a sinusoidal variation as the suggestions of other previous investigators (Kaluzny & Pojmanski 1984, Demircan & Selam 1993). The calculation shows that the cyclic period change has a period of about 56.3yrs with an amplitude of about 0.d052. The period variation has been discussed in terms of two potential mechanisms: 1) the light-time effect due to a hypothetical third body and 2) deformations in the convective envelope of a magnetically active component. The BVR light curves of SS Ari observed for about one month showed the existence of cycle to cycle light variations. Long-term light changes of SS Ari are discussed in terms of the period variation of the binary system.