Blogs

After more than five years of redesign, engineering, and commissioning, the 18” handicap-accessible Wren-MarcarioAccessible Telescope (WMAT) will be rededicated at the McDonald Observatory Frank N. Bash Visitor’s Center this Saturday, July 17, 2010. The recommissioning of the telescope was completed by Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network) engineers and scientists, and funded by LCOGT founders Wayne Rosing and Dorothy Largay, Mike and Shirley Marcario, Mike I. and Dee Jones, Bill and Becky Wren and anonymous donors.  read more »

Last weekend I was part of the first UK Science Hack Day. Strangely it lasts a whole weekend, but the ‘day’ aspect refers to a 24 hour hack session. We were hosted by The Guardian newspaper in London (where many people also ended up sleeping there too!). The interesting aspect of the weekend was undoubtably the people; science academics who were keen on coding mixed with computer coders who were keen on science to work on joint projects.  read more »

The observatory site we are affectionately calling BPL (back parking lot) is our on-site testing ground for the 1m and 0.4m projects. We have an enclosure for each; an aqawan for 0.4m and an Ash dome for our 1m. The first of our 1m network was recently installed and achieved first light on 12 June. The seeing from Santa Barbara was not ideal (about 4") but the attached colour image is still a major achievement.  read more »

Students from the Hawaiian islands havebeen attending the 2010 HI-STAR program at the University of Hawai`iat Mānoa.The program pairs students with researchers at the University ofHawai`i to work on research projects. Topics include “Young HotStars”, exoplanets, asteroids detection, comets, nebulae, and CVstars. The program has an impressive track record. Students areencouraged to enter the engineering and science fair.  read more »

Last night, the 0.4m telescope in the back parking lot (BPL) produced the first fully ‘sequenced’ observation with the new control system.  The sequencer is the layer of software which sits on top of all the low-level telescope, instrument, and enclosure control systems and figures out what all needs to be done to accomplish an observation.  It then ‘sequences’ those operations to satisfy their dependencies (e.g. don’t start exposing until the enclosure is open) and sees them through to completion.
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For the past week Richard Miles (BAA) has been following an as-yet unidentified object orbiting the Sun (dubbed 2010 KQ), using Faulkes Telescope North. Recent observations suggest it is a man-made object with an exciting past.  read more »

The 59th annual California State Science Fair was held on May 17-18, 2010. This year 960 participants represented 394 schools throughout the state and competed for awards totaling over $50,000. Daniel Godinez and Caylin Canales took fourth place in the Junior Physics and Astronomy division. Daniel and Caylin with their teacher Kim Miller from Goleta Valley Junior High, observed the Monoceros R2 cluster with Faulkes Telescope South earlier this year.  read more »

 There has been steady progress at our Cerro Tololo , Chile site over the past few month. Here are latest photos from Enrique (who is project managing the ground work for us in Chile). This might not look like much but it represents a significant advance in the readiness of the site to house telescopes. Earlier on this year the ground had some large boulders which need to be removed (or smashed up and then removed) and the whole site made level.  read more »

When I represented LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at last year’s AstroDay, I never thought that we could meet with more people in a single day.  We edged out last year when over 250 people visited our booth at AstroDay this year.  read more »