Education Article list

Extrasolar planets are planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.The first extrasolar planet discovery was confirmed in 1992, although they had been predicted long before. Planets are difficult to detect directly because they are so much dimmer than the stars they orbit. The Sun is 10⁹ times brighter than Jupiter and 10¹⁰ times brighter than the Earth. 455 extrasolar planets have been discovered as of May 31, 2010. Astronomers use 5 main methods to find extrasolar planets indirectly.  read more »

Downloading Stellarium

Stellarium is a free, open source planetarium application which allows the night sky to be viewed from any location on Earth, on any date. The software can be downloaded from www.stellarium.org, together with installation instructions.

When you open Stellarium, it adopts the date and time from your computer clock - the first screen looks similar to the image here.  read more »

Asteroids

Asteroids are rocky objects which orbit the Sun in our Solar System, but are too small to be considered planets. They are in fact, commonly known as Minor Planets due to their size. The majority of the asteroids in our Solar System orbit the Sun in what we call the ‘Asteroid Belt’. This is located between Mars and Jupiter as can be seen in the diagram below.   read more »

If you have access to the LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network network provided by Faulkes Telescope Project, this video might help when planning your first observing session. The video walks you through using the control interface, so you can see what to expect. The interface is simple to use and provides plenty of assistance for inexperienced observers. If you do not know what to observe you can pick astronomical objects from one of many Guided Tours of the sky, Search for an object that you know the name of, or more advanced observers can enter your own co-ordinates.

You can also try out our interactive demo which gives you an experience of the control interface without needing to login or book observing time.  read more »

The discovery of the icy exoplanet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb (just 5 times more massive than Earth) by the technique of gravitational microlensing provided the first observational hint that Earth-like planets are common in the Universe. The existence of this new world was revealed from a small blip in the brightness of the star, on just one night, but we will probably never be able to see it again by this method.  read more »

These instructions will take you through the steps of downloading and starting DS9.  read more »

These instructions will take you through the steps of downloading and starting DS9.  read more »

Asteroids are impossible to spot in single images so we need to use software to find them. To identify an asteroid, we have to catch it moving. This article will show you how to you a free piece of software called astrometrica to do this.  read more »

Astrometrica is a simple to use Windows application which will read in raw telescope data (FITS files) for a set of observations, and check to see if there are any moving objects in them. You can ‘blink’ data files to see the object moving, mark its name if its know about, and even report a new asteroid to the Minor Planets Center.  read more »

This article will tell you how to use photoshop to make high quality color images with your astronomical data.  read more »

Iris is a free piece of software for Microsoft Windows that allows you to do basic data processing on astronomical data files. Sometimes you won’t be able to take a long exposure (for example, there might be bright stars in the field of view which would saturate), and you have to take many shorter exposure and then stack them. This guide will run you through stacking FITS images with Iris.  read more »

Hubble’s original classification of galaxy types was published in 1936 in a book called "The Realm of the Nebulae".  Since then several people have suggested modifications and additions to his original scheme, but the basic idea of his "tuning fork diagram" has continued to be found useful by astronomers.  Below is a diagrammatic representation of one commonly used simple modification of his diagram.  read more »

Asteroids are awkward; they don’t stay in one place!  Not only that, as the Earth rotates, different asteroids are visible from the Earth at different times.  You might therefore think that finding the position of an asteroid in the sky might be a difficult task.  Fortunately, much of the difficult work has already been done by various groups of people, and it is not as difficult as you might imagine finding the co-ordinates of an asteroid in the sky.  You will need to follow these instructions on the same day as your observing session.  read more »