| Abstract |
High energy gamma-ray astronomy probes the most extreme phenomena in our universe: super novae and their remnants as well as supermassive black holes at the center of far away galaxies. The First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope (FACT) is a small, prototype Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) operating since 2011 at the Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain. It specializes in continuously monitoring the brightest known sources of gamma rays. In this thesis, I present a new, open analysis chain for the data recorded by FACT, with a major focus on ensuring reproducibility and relying on modern, well-tested tools with widespread adoption. The integral sensitivity of FACT was improved by 45 {%} compared to previous analyses by the introduction of an improved algorithm for the reconstruction of origin of the gamma rays and many smaller improvements in the preprocessing. Sensitivity is evaluated both on simulated datasets as well as observations of the Crab Nebula, the "standard candle" of gamma-ray astronomy. Another major advantage of this new analysis chain is the elimination of the dependence on a known point source position from the event reconstruction, thus enabling the creation of skymaps, the analysis of observations where the source position is not exactly known and sharing reconstructed events in the now standardized format for open gamma-ray astronomy. This has lead to the first publication of a joined, multi-instrument analysis on open data of four currently operating Cherenkov telescopes. A smaller second part of this thesis is concerned with enabling robotic operation of FACT, which is now the first Cherenkov telescope, where no operators are required during regular observations.
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