For the past few months a small team of astronomers from uplands community college have been on a mission to locate a new ellusive asteroid using are schools classes to the Faulks telescope project located in Hawaii and Australia. The study was tedious and extremely hard, we were hoping to get a deep space picture of it but after a lack of information about where in the image to find the asteroid, and bad weather anomalies over Hawaii and Australia we finally conceded defeat and a four and a half month project came to an end. We used a blinking method which means that we take several pictures of an area of space and we flash the pictures and see of we can see a correlation between the pictures but any disturbances like planes and asteroids which ruin the pictures.

Although this mission was a failure we hope to start a new one were we hope to discover something new in our galaxy or the next.
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



by Jordan Harris (Yr10) Badge Winner
(Editor)

[*Ed. Jordan also had the idea to take different colour pictures of the same area of sky, and see if the asteroid movement could be seen by layering the images, but, unfortunately, this did not reveal any more than the above pictures]

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

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

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