Faulkes Telescope 7s2 (30th June 2010)

A lovely clear sky for class 7s2 to do their viewing.

It was an amazing experience for the students who took turns to control the telescope by first entering the RA and Dec (Right Ascension and Declination...the astral equivalent to longitude and latitude).
Once the telescope had shown the area of sky to be imaged, it was time to push the 'move telescope' button. It amazed the class to see the telescope moving even though it was dark. A smaller infrared telescope detects the heat the Faulkes Telescope has absorbed (takes in) in the daytime and emits (sends out) for some time after the sun goes down.

Not only did we have a clear sky, but the sky objects the students chose to image were fairly close together, and we managed to take pictures of five different objects...all very beautiful!


An open cluster Sky Object Name: m25
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 30, 2010 11:34:25 UTC
RA: 18h31'36"
DEC: -19°15'00"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 10 secs.
Instrument: EM01


Triffid Nebula Sky Object Name: m20
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 30, 2010 11:39:58 UTC
RA: 18h02'20"
DEC: -23°03'10"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Eagle Nebula Sky Object Name: m16
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 30, 2010 11:45:20 UTC
RA: 18h18'52"
DEC: -13°49'42"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Ring Nebula Sky Object Name: m57
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 30, 2010 11:49:59 UTC
RA: 18h53'36"
DEC: 33°01'40"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 3 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Dumbell Nebula Sky Object Name: m27
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 30, 2010 11:57:49 UTC
RA: 19h59'36"
DEC: 22°43'00"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Once we lost control of the telescope again, it was the students' chance to ask questions. We covered areas such as

• The size of our sun compared to other suns, how stars form and that our sun is a star;
• Black holes - how they are made, whether they have been seen, where everything that's sucked into them goes (and whether or not anyone has ever fallen into one!)
• The difference between Supernovas and Hypernovas (a matter of size...)

and many more fascinating questions.

Royal Astronomical Society Newspaper Competition 2010

Royal Astronomical Society Newspaper Competition 2010

Imagine ……..
…. If this year, after thousands of years of wondering and fifty years of searching, the first message from intelligent life outside our Solar System was received.

Could you ….
..... Create the words and pictures on that first message from an extraterrestrial civilization, showing what their world is like ….?

The Royal Astronomical Society Newspaper Competition

Our highly successful interdisciplinary competition has been running for over ten years. It is an excellent opportunity to forge cross-curricular links and to use the internet and your library to search for material…….

The Newspaper Competition is open to groups of students in two age ranges 7–11 and 11–14 years.

Entrants in this section should publish a small newspaper, which describes the contents of the first message from an extraterrestrial civilisation. The message may be form a civilisation similar to our own or perhaps much more advanced. The message may describe the beings who sent it and their world. The message may be friendly, hostile or asking for help – it is up to you!

The Feature Article Competition is open to individual students in two age ranges 14–16 and 16–19 years.

Entrants in this section are asked to produce an article suitable for a scientific magazine, which reviews the content of the first message received from an extraterrestrial civilisation. It should explain to its readers what we can learn about the beings that sent it, their world and their technology.

WIN a prize for your school !

Registration details here (or below)

Registration

All prospective entrants must register by e-mailing: newspaper@ras.org.uk as soon as possible for an electronic entry form.

Please enclose an SAE if you require acknowledgement of the receipt of your entry. On the front page of you entry you must include:

Name, address and postcode of your School
E-mail address and telephone number of your School
Name of your class or group, if appropriate
Age range of your entry (Newspaper – 7–11 or 11–14, Feature Article – 14-16 r 16-19 yrs.)
Full name of your teacher (e.g. Ms Jane Smith, Mr John Jones)
A signed declaration by your teacher that the selection of existing material was done by the group or individual and all original material, design and layout was the work of the group or individual.

The decision of the judges is final and the results will be announced on the RAS website (www.ras.org.uk) in September 2010. Winners will be informed directly. Work cannot be returned. The competition is organised by the Education Committee of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Please send your entry to:

‘…… message received…..’
Newspaper Competition, Royal Astronomical Society,
Burlington House, Piccadilly, LONDON, W1J 0BQ

Entries to arrive by Monday 26 July 2010

Lamberhurst Primary school - Who left the lights on?

Mr Pert expected to be showing pupils at Lamberhurst Primary School how the Faulkes Telescope works. Faulkes Telescope North (FTN - Hawaii) was all booked up and ready to go, but apart from about half an hour this morning, the telescope was closed. Why? Because someone left the lights on!!

Can you believe it?!

Despite this, the pupils enjoyed an hour long session, learning the location of Hawaii compared to England, how peeling satsumas can help to describe how maps are made (unfortunately, the class teacher came back half way through this excercise, and not realising the orange peels were an integral part of the lesson, chucked them in the bin! :-) )

Then the Stellarium program was demonstrated. Though the telescope couldn't take the images that had been planned, it was possible for Mr Pert to show what they would have looked like using the archive images.

Forthcoming Event: Brian Cox Internet Lecture 28th June

Star Lectures
by Brian Cox, physicist, recent presenter of BBC's "Wonders of the Solar System"





On Monday 28 June 2010, University of Manchester Physicist Professor Brian Cox will be delivering a lecture aimed at GCSE/Key Stage 4 Science pupils that will be broadcast live via webcast. Professor Cox will be discussing the "Big Bang", the origins of the universe and the importance of science to our modern civilisation.

Live Webcast

Where: on our live webcast page - a link will be posted on 28 June

When: Monday 28 June

Time: 1.30pm - 2.30pm BST

**If you want to see this video live, it will be shown at the Drama Studio at 1.30pm Monday (Arrive earlier. No admittance after form time bell goes!!) [update: cancelled due to technical problems. DVD of event will hopefully available to view in a similar session at a later date (hopefully before the end of term!)]

(If you miss the lecture on Monday, you can always catch it later on YouTube )

Yr 7 Faulkes Telescope 18th June 2010

Images taken by class 7p1.

The first is the possibly newly-discovered asteroid 2010 LX15 we have been following for the last week to aid scientists track its path so they can tell how near to Earth it's going to come:

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 18, 2010 09:24:55 UTC
RA: 16h46'10"
DEC: -22°45'17"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM01
The second image was a globular cluster, a cluster of 'old' stars (rather than an area where new stars are being formed). The stars often appear of similar age and intensity:
Sky Object Name: m13
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 18, 2010 09:12:07 UTC
RA: 16h41'42"
DEC: 36°27'41"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM01

The third image is one of our favourites, the Ring Nebula (M57), which, even with an exposure of only 3 seconds per red, green and blue filter, still manages to look fabulous!
Sky Object Name: m57
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 18, 2010 09:05:03 UTC
RA: 18h53'36"
DEC: 33°01'40"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 3 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Riddle by Jack Morgan, Yr9

What am I???

You can see my smiling face
But never see my dark side
I’m like a nocturnal animal
And at day I do hide
I can only be with you for 28 days
And then get replaced by something new
Scars on my face, big things have hit me
Now this is the question I ask to you…

What am I???

by Jack Morgan (Yr9) Badge Winner

2010 LX15 moves, but can we see it?

Unfortunately we can't control the weather, and although it wasn't completely clouded over, there was some intermittant cloud cover, and it affected many of the images. Compared to yesterday's images, these were very poor, and many of the dimmer stars cannot be seen! (Perhaps, using a program to enhance the images, we may be able to pick out a little more detail. If we succeed, we'll put these on here later for comparison... )


One of the images we took replicated yesterday's co-ordinates, so we could directly compare the images:

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:18:14 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03

The next three are todays solar filter images of the same asteroid imaged yesterday:

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:07:00 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:12:05 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:28:16 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03

We also took three experimental seperate colour images, taken about 3 mins apart, with 30second exposure, to investigate an idea by Yr 9 student, Jordan Harris, who hypothesised that if we took with the three colour filters, with long enough exposure we should be able to see the asteroid turn from red to green to blue.

Unfortunately, these pictures were some of the worst affected by the weather, and weren't very clear. Jordan has some ideas how they might still be used, but they aren't brilliantly effective. However, at the end we had a little time over, so we tried a 60 second RGB exposure (which means 60 seconds with each of the red, green and blue filters) and that worked out a bit better...

Red Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:03:45 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: R
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Green Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:08:46 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Green
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Blue Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:13:47 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: Blue
Exposure time: 30 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Red/Green/Blue (RGB) filter at 60 seconds each. This single image is composed of three seperate colour images, which can be downloaded and analysed in different ways. Jordan has created a method for doing that, which he will hopefully share with us here!:

Sky Object Name: 2010 LX15
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 16, 2010 13:25:01 UTC
RA: 16h47'51"
DEC: -22°44'53"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 60 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Poem by James Roye, yr 9

Twas early in the solar system
And all through space
Nothing was living
There was no human race

When suddenly the sun exploded

Hydrogen and helium became their own odours
They formed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune too
The rocks stayed close to the sun and they grew

Earth, Mars, Mercury and even Venus
All the denser stuff settled down beneath us

The solar winds shoot out from the sun
And Earth’s magnetism protects us from the burn
Magnetic poles make an atmospheric force field
Pushing away the flares and giving us a shield

James Roye (Yr9)Badge Winner

Asteroid 2010 LX15

The Astronomy group had an opportunity to contribute towards science today, as they used the Faulkes Telescope (Australia) to obtain images of a possibly newly discovered asteroid. The images they took may appear to be exactly the same, but somewhere within these six images is the tiniest of movements....can anyone spot it?

Students in the class looked up the Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec) - equivalents of latitude and longitude - and found that the area the asteroid was in seemed to be near Scorpios, and possibly in Ophiuchus. Mr Pert guessed that it would be somewhere in the Zodiac zone, since it is probably orbiting the sun in the same plane as the planets.

Tomorrow we are going to take a few more images of the same asteroid, and see if we can find the movement (though I've searched I've had no success so far...) and then we will try a program called 'DS9' to study and compare the images:

Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:04:41 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:08:02 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:11:15 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:14:26 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:26:23 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


This one had a lower exposure time:Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:28:27 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 20 secs.
Instrument: EM03

There was also time in the middle of the session to have a quick look at another deep space object:

NGC 6818Sky Object Name: NGC 6818
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:21:06 UTC
RA: 19h43'58"
DEC: -14°09'07"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 20 secs.
Instrument: EM03

Faulkes at Heathfield Community College

Mr Pert visited Heathfield Community College to demonstrate the Faulkes Telescope to a group of students preparing for their AS year. The sky was clear and they obtained four successful (and very lovely) images:

A globula clusterSky Object Name: m15
When taken: Jun 14, 2010 13:55:54 UTC
RA: 21h29'58"
DEC: 12°10'00"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 6 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Dumbell Nebula
Sky Object Name: M27
When taken: Jun 14, 2010 13:50:46 UTC
RA: 19h59'36"
DEC: 22°43'01"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 60 secs.
Instrument: EM01



Ring NebulaSky Object Name: M57
When taken: Jun 14, 2010 13:43:30 UTC
RA: 18h53'36"
DEC: 33°01'40"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 10 secs.
Instrument: EM01



Eagle Nebula

Sky Object Name: M16
When taken: Jun 14, 2010 13:38:15 UTC
RA: 18h18'52"
DEC: -13°49'42"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 70 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Thanks from Maynards Green

One of the lovely things about demonstrating the Faulkes Telescope to local primary schools is how much they appreciate it. Here are a few of the wonderful cards to Mr Pert from the children of Maynards Green...if only there was space enough to show them all!