World first for Knowle Astronomical Society

Faulkes Telescope observing session on Saturday 5th March 2005 was first time an amateur society used a large robotic telescope on the other side of the world

This exciting event was hosted by the University of Warwick and organised on behalf of the Knowle Astronomical Society by Richard Beare in the university's Institute of Education. The Faulkes Telescope in Hawaii was controlled remotely over the internet using Internet Explorer and a normal personal computer running Windows. The Faulkes Telescopes in Hawaii and Australia are the largest telescopes in the world devoted to education. They have two metre primary mirrors and are the gift of Dr Martin (Dill) Faulkes. Each is completely robotic and involves unique state of the art technology.

Look at the images obtained and photos of the event

The images are displayed as processed automatically by the telescope image processing software. Enhanced versions will be added later.

Click here to see the images

Click here to see photos of the event

Images are copyright of the Faulkes Telescope Project

Details of objects to be observed

List of objects in Excel spreadsheet form     Right click to download or left click to open in browser

Map showing objects to be observed in the Hawaiian sky at 11:15 UT

Starry Night file showing locations of objects    Right click to download, then start Starry Night and open from within the software

(File was saved using SN Pro 4.5, but hopefully will open in more basic versions.)

Preview images and get other information from the SIMBAD site in Strasbourg

Information on the Hubble Classification of Galaxies

Activities while waiting for observations

During the observing people who have chosen objects for observation had the opportunity to say why they wanted to observe these objects.

While waiting for exposures and processing to complete there were demonstrations during which the data acquired was analysed. These demonstrations were conducted using a second computer and projector and they were intended to make the session far more interesting and memorable, than would be the case if we just concentrated on beautiful images. For example, the following things were shown:

• measuring the sizes and shapes of objects

• comparing the images taken using different filters and drawing scientific conclusions

• how surface brightness varies across a galaxy and a planetary nebula (by looking at slices and contours)

• fitting spiral shapes to the spiral arms of galaxies

• simulating galaxy collisions using the Galaxy Collider software

• how to make a colour image of Jupiter from the separate red, green and blue images obtained from the telescope

Richard Beare    4th April, 2005

Richard Beare's home page