Edward Gomez's blog

The network expansion continues. Earlier this week Faulkes Telescope North was joined by 2 smaller telescopes, installed inside the Haleakala observatory enclosure as can be seen in the images. You can just make out the 2 small black tubes next to FTN.

Mark Elphick (Haleakala LCOGT site manager) and Brian Haworth (IT leader) installed both 0.4m telescopes. It involved lifting over 600 lb of telescope 10 feet in the air, without crane or forklift, just brute strength.

We've recently launched an exoplanet observing programme, and are looking for people to help with observing these very rare microlensing events. One such group in Ireland has already taken up the challenge and successfully observed 10 different candidates (each one multiple times). Each time the group meets they write a detailed blog entry about their experiences.

We would like to make all our users aware that we will be performing IT maintenance at 0500 UT on 11 March. This will mean some of our services will be unavailable (including the website and data archives).

From this time onwards network outages, loss of access into the SBA network will happen at irregular intervals until all changes have been applied. Hopefully the most of the work will be finished by the time 1700 UT (0900 PST).  Please don't plan to do any work during that period that relies on access to SBA servers.

Not only keeping the telescopes dry but safe from wind, snow and all adverse weather conditions.

For the 0.4m network the answer to this comes in the form the Aqawan enclosure. You can see the first model, fresh from the workshop in the top image on the right, and standing in it is the lead engineer for the project, Annie Hjelstrom. This enclosure has been installed in the parking lot of the Santa Barbara headquarters of LCOGT and will be housing a single 0.4m which will be used for testing the control software.

An image taken with LCOGT's Faulkes Telescope North was the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 26th 2008. You can view the APOD site here:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

The image of the planetary nebula M27 was taken by top UK astrophotographer Nik Szymanek. The final image was a mosaic of 4 frames (each frame made up stacked images), using the narrow band filters H alpha, H beta and OIII.