News & Blogs

With half of the world’s population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced the wonderment of pristinely dark skies and maybe never will. This loss, caused by light pollution, is a concern on many fronts: safety, energy conservation, cost, health and effects on wildlife, as well as our ability to view the stars. Even though light pollution is a serious and growing global concern, it is one of the easiest environmental problems you can address on local levels.  read more »

This comet appears to have undergone another massive outburst, this time on 2010 February 2 increasing in brightness by a factor of 30-40.  The object is one of the largest active comets known.  It follows a near-circular path about 6.2 AU from the Sun, i.e. well beyond the orbit of Jupiter.  This is its fourth outburst of a similar magnitude in the past 8 years.  The nucleus of the comet is probably about 50 km in size and its behaviour may be a consequence of its very slow rotation along with the fact that it appears to be rich in carbon monoxide, a very volatile gas.  The outburst was discovered only a few hours after it had begun by amateur astronomer, Faustino Garcia of Asturias, Spain on February 2nd at 23:58 UT during the course of routine monitoring of several comets.  read more »

We have been commissioning a new camera over the past few months, called Spectral (although it is an imaging camera not a spectrometer).  One of our science interns (BJ Fulton) has been following an open cluster monitoring program and has been among the first people to use the spectral camera on Faulkes Telescope North  for science. BJ is particularly interested in finding out the mass of the stars in these clusters.  read more »

I rediscovered a tool that I had forgotten about this morning. A website called Wordle which can grab all the text from a website, rss feed or even a paragraph that you submit and graphically display the words in a semi-artistic way. Larger words representing a greater frequency of that word. Its very like a tag cloud, but looks at the whole text rather than just the tags and then produces a non-clickable picture (ignoring words like ‘and’ and ‘the’). It gives you an attractive and visual way to find out what are popular topics on our website.  read more »

The development of our custom made enclosures for our 0.4m telescopes is continuing. The project is called Aqawan, which is the Chumash word for ‘to be dry’. Have a look at my previous blog entry about the aqawan design.  read more »

Over the past year I have been working on a series of science video podcasts (or vodcasts), with Jon Yardley and Olivia Gomez. There are lots of vodcasts available in the world of science but I wanted to make some which were fun and accessibe but did not turn down the volume on the science. The idea of the Teapots from Space came into being as a vehicle for telling different scientific stories. The Teapots are like a cross between a sci-fi B-movie and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Nothing is taken too seriously, but the science is all correct.  read more »

This week, a number of scientists have gathered in Madrid to discuss the first science results from the Herschel Space Telescope.    Herschel is the largest astronomical telescope ever put in space (the mirror is 3.5m wide!) and observes light at infrared to submillimetre wavelengths (50 - 550 microns), around 500 times larger than the wavelength of visible light.  Astronomers built this telescope to observe cold objects (shining at 10K or -260C) in the Universe, since these sources radiate at this wavelength.  read more »

On 30 October Kurt Vander Horst and Jacob Towsley commissioned the new Wren Marcario Accessible Telescope (WMAT) telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. WMAT is a unique design for telescope which is accessible to people in a seated position, particularly in a wheelchair. LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network are assisting with the construction and commissioning of the telescope. The WMAT website has much more information, including updates and photos.

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Faulkes Telescope North has undergone a substantial refurbishment. The primary mirror has been removed using a portable gantry, and block and tackle. This is no mean undertaking as the mirror itself weighs over a ton, at 1240 Kg (2734 lbs). The mirror was then moved to a facility on the Haleakala mountain top where it was re-aluminized. This is the first time the mirror has had more than a wash since its installation in 2003.   read more »

As part of Twitter Moonwatch  we have been working with our UK education partner Faulkes Telescope Project and the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (UK national node), to bring a competition to win an hour observing on Faulkes Telescope South .  read more »

Tonight We will attempt to image the LCROSS impact using the Faulkes Telescope North. Recently students at Kalama Intermediate on Maui created their own LCROSS event.  Assisted by Dr. J. D. Armstrong, on Friday October 2nd students in the astronomy club tested impactors that they had constructed from clay.  the purpose of the investigation was to determine how the shape of the impactor affects the formation of the plume.  read more »

October 3, 2009 was the first annual Science Day at the Santa Barbara Zoo.  Many excited kids, parents, and teachers got to spend a sunny Saturday surrounded not only by hundreds of exciting and exotic animals, but by also learning about different types of science and by participating in several fun and educational hands-on activities.     read more »

Every year the Las Cumbres Amateur Outreach Award is presented to an individual displaying outstanding outreach by an amateur astronomer to children and the public. This award is presented at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) annual meeting, after the ASP board of directors have reviewed all the candidates.  read more »

On September 18 the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Haleakalā division held their third annual Open House from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.  This year ice cream was added to the popular liquid nitrogen demonstration.  The lab tours allowed hundreds of people to see the equipment used by scientists, and amazingly nothing was broken.  PanSTARRS added a tour of their control room, and a cratering activity – an activity that had JD drying used coffee grounds from Starbucks for four weeks.  read more »

Sunday 13th of September 2009.

Haleakala and the Faukes telescope are accustomed to international visitors but this is the first time to my knowledge that FTN has welcomed visitors from South Korea. The two sisters Yun K Oh  and Sun K are from Seoul in South Korea.

The two young ladies earlier in the day had participated in a horseback ride into the Haleakala crater and I will bear witness to their excitment during that ride into the crater. However their response when they saw FTN  made their reactions during the crater trek pale into insignificance.  read more »

This movie shows the whole night on Haleakala from an all sky camera we have installed next to Faulkes Telescope North. The camera takes images every 3 minutes and this is a 15 frame/smovie of the images taken on September 1 from 04:45 UT (just as the Sunsets) to 14:00 UT. The timestamp of each image is shown just below thedate in the top left corner. Below that is the exposure time, whichautomatically adjusts to the light level, meaning that we can also usethe camera during the day time.  read more »

New addition to the website:

There is now a link to nightly summary graphs and overall statistics for each site on the main Network page on the left hand side (or you can click here).  For now it is focused on FTN and FTS, but will include more telescopes as they come online.  read more »

I have been working with a student from Mechelen Technical School (near Antwerp), Belgium on an asteroid project. The student contacted me about using the "Making Craters " activity as part of year long project for final year of secondary school. He has just submitted his dissertation and has presented it to a judging panel. Here are his experiences  read more »

It is company policy to name each of our sites (internationally) after the closest airport, using the 3-digit airport code. Santa Barbara is SBA, which is quite understandable. Haleakala is labelled OGG after Kahului airport on Maui. The origin of this acronym is slightly mystifying, and the reason for it is as follows.  read more »

Last night, we realised that all the analysis we did on the polar alignment and azimuth axis the night previously had been the wrong way.  We were so frustrated!  I would like to blame altitude for this, but it appears to be a software issue which told us to move the back end of the telescope up, when in reality we had to go down.  This confused us for around an hour but we soon got back to the taking of pretty pictures.  read more »