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]

Presentation by Dom Oram, Yr 13

This morning we were lucky enough to be treated to a presentation by sixth former, Dom Oram. He has developed his own software to re-create the complicated effects of Gravity in a planetary system.



Dom originally wrote the program in Visual-basic when he was a GCSE astronomy student a few years ago. However, since then he has changed the programing language to C++, since the original language was not powerful enough for the things he wanted it to do. He wanted the program to be able to show, not only how different masses affected a planetary system, but also wanted it to show light, colour and texture of the planets.





Over time, Dom has also added background stars and effects to show heat emitted from the planet. As well as this, if you click on any planetary body in the system, you are able to move down to ground level, and see what you would see from there in the sky (eg the sun rising and setting & it getting correspondingly lighter and darker.)







Dom's presentation captured the imagination of his audience, and they were able to ask interesting questions at the end about the program, and how Dom planned to develop it into the future. Dom will be studying physics at (Durham ?) University in September, and plans to combine it with a programming course to help him develop his project further.



From Heathfield Community college, we were delighted to welcome sixth formers (pictured below) Joe Benians, Toby Crisford and Nathan Masters, as well as their physics teacher Ms Waddington; and Mr Howard (not in picture), who will be head of 6th form in Heathfield from September. They stayed on afterwards to carry out some physics experiments after Dom's presentation.



We also welcomed Mr Clive Oram, Dom's proud father, who thorougly enjoyed the presentation.

Also watching the presentation were most of Yr12 physics groups and a few staff who missed Dom's first presentation on 21st April 2010.


Dom Oram (badge winner)

What am I?

I am a lone wolf, or should you say traveller
Drifting from place to place
Every now and then I get a kick and a prod
Some call me a waste of space

I have many brothers and sisters
A key to a forgotten land
But just to let you know
I am bigger than a grain of sand

And as time goes by
I wonder, what am I?

.
.
.
.
.
by Jack Morgan (Yr9) Badge Winner
(Editor)

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

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

Poem by Jack Morgan, Yr9

Big, old, big, old asteroid belt
How I wonder how it felt
Round and round our fiery sun
Wouldn't that be a lot of fun

Magnetic field, it's a powerful force
It made solar wind go off course
That's how Mars got fried
If we were there, we'd have died

When the Earth got hit it went-a-flying
But not the substence called iron
That is how the moon was made
Ever since then, it has stayed

That's the day the Earth was born!

Jack Morgan (Yr9) Badge Winner

Faulkes Telescope Tue 14 July, 2009 14:30 UTC

Around a few months ago, we (the astronomy group) got to use the Faulkes Telescope to get our own pictures of the universe. In the end…we were left with 3 pictures.

lc 5146: RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters

mgc 7686: H-alpha (hydrogen) filter

M15: RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters

To get these pictures, we did this:

First we chose which stars/galaxies/clusters we wanted to look at. This was done simply with Stellarium, which gave us the coordinates of what we wanted to look at. It also proved useful as we could also see what would and wouldn’t be visible on the day we used the telescope.
For the next part, we chose which out of the stars we wanted were best and then planned which order to photograph them. This was to save time when the telescope had to shift position between images. With Mr. Pert helping us, this was quickly done.
Finally we could use the telescope. For this, all we needed to do was input the coordinates of the star we wanted and wait for it to be photographed. When Mr.Pert had put in the coordinates, we got a live feed of the telescope moving. In the 30 min time frame, we got the 3 images you see above.
Overall, it was a fun experience that I learned a lot from. If I got the chance to do it again, I would.

by Connor Lynch (Yr10)
Badge Winner