egomez's blog

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 »

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 »

 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 »

For those of you who have been following our news of recent comet observations and analysis by Richard Miles (BAA), he has provided us with an update on his observations of comet Vales.  read more »

Richard Miles from British Astronomical Association has been coordinating UK schools to make observations of a comet that is behaving strangely. Comet P/2010 H2 (VALES) underwent a major outburst around 2010 April 15 brightening by more than 1000 times (possibly even more than this) in a matter of a few hours.  Before this date, the object  was not known.  After this date it had taken on the appearance of a 12th magnitude star.  The comet sooon began to exhibit an expanding coma.
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We recently hosted a workshop in our Santa Barbara headquarters at the end of the KITP annual teachers’ conference. During the tour around the facilities, one teacher (Steve Cooperman) took some stereograms and made anaglyphs out of them (click on the images to the right, for bigger versions). He has kindly provided us with some very nice examples (you will need to put on old-fashioned red-blue 3D glasses for the full effect). These images of are of our testing rig for the 1m, which currently has 2 co-mounted, smaller telescopes on it. Below Steve has given us an account of how he achieved it.  read more »

Experienced amateur astronomer, Richard Miles, recently visited Faulkes Telescope South . Richard has been leading our recent observing programme to follow a cometary outburst, and provides expert advice for our Asteroids and Comets programme . He was on holiday in Australia and took some excellent long exposure images of the night sky where you can see FTS and stars!  read more »

The discovery of nine new planets challenges the reigning theory of the formation of planets, according to new observations by astronomers, 2 of which for our own Dr Rachel Street and Dr Tim Lister .

Unlike the planets in our solar system, two of the newly discovered planets are orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star. This upsets the primary theory of how planets are formed. The planets are called “exoplanets” because they are located outside of our solar system.  read more »