egomez's blog

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »