Blog Archive: 2008

An image taken with LCOGT’s Faulkes Telescope North was the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 26th 2008.  read more »

April Gadsby, an 8th grader at Goleta Valley Junior High in Santa Barbara, has won 1st prize (Gold) in the Santa Barbara County Science Fair, and 4th in the California State Science Fair, with an eclipsing binary lightcurve research project with LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network. April is the first student in the US to have used the Faulkes Telescope South which lives in Australia and is controlled over the internet.  read more »

A number of school students have won prizes in national and international competitions after working with LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network scientists and facilities.  On Friday 23rd May, ESO announced the winners of its "Catch a Star" competition:

"ESO and EAAE are very pleased to announce the winners of the Catch a Star 2008 contest. We would like to congratulate everyone who took part in the competition. The standard of the entries was extremely impressive, which made it difficult for the jury to choose the winners!  read more »

LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network participated in this years prestigious Royal Society Exhibition with an exhibit titled: Is there anybody out there? Looking for new worlds. There were three general themes, each outlining the most popular methods used
to detect planets around other stars: Doppler shifts (wobbles), microlensing (blips) and transits
 (winks).  read more »

The Faulkes Telescope project team and astronomers from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University ran a highly successful “Observatory” at the 2008 National Eisteddfod. This year’s event was visited by around 156,000 people, and the Science Pavilion attracted around 2,000 people a day over the 8 days of the event.  read more »

During the summer of 2007 Olivia Gomez, a student at St David's Catholic 6th Form College, Cardiff, worked on Faulkes data of one of the most enigmatic objects in the sky, the Crab nebula.  read more »

There will be 21 telescopes spaced around the world, arranged in clusters of three telescopes at each of seven sites in the North and South hemispheres. Weather permitting, this enables continuous coverage of celestial objects of interest - mainly time-variable objects. Each telescope is an f/8 system with a 4K CCD providing a 27 arcmin field of view (almost as big as the full moon), and a comprehensive filter set.  read more »

A British amateur astronomer has discovered the fastest rotating natural object known in our Solar System, using data from FT South part of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, have proved that the newly-discovered asteroid, 2008 HJ is revolving once every 42.7 seconds, classifying it is as a ‘superfast rotator’.  read more »

Just in case you were wondering if there was a conspiracy and FT South was being used for top secret observations, but appearing to be offline, here are some of the latest pictures.  read more »

Two leading schools in the Faulkes Telescope Project have collaborated in a year long videoconferencing project on disease dynamics with a team of mathematicans and staff from the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University.   read more »

We are pleased to announce that we have 3 new exciting galaxies projects for FT users to enjoy! From energetic jets to crashing galaxies, these projects aim to cover a variety of galaxy topics.  read more »

To mark the start of National Science Week 2008 and the opening of a new exhibition in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network was asked to attend a space themed day, last Saturday.

 

Edward Gomez and Jon Yardley setup a stand with laptops for the general public to use to make colour images from archive Faulkes Telescope data (using Adobe Photoshop elements with the ESA, FITS liberator plugin) and explore solar system (using the free software Celestia).

   read more »