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We went the to the astronomy center in the physics department in NUIG, along with our teachers Ms. Herbert and Mr. Ryder. There we met with our soon-to-be-mentor Gregg Hallinan, who had booked us a session on the Faulkes Telescope. We arrived early so we would be able to take the Real-Time Interface Demo and become familiar with the telescopes workings. In the demonstration we entered the names and coordinates of Saturn, Pal3 and the Eagle nebula and it showed us what the telescope would do and how the images would look if we had control of the telescope.We then took control of the telescope we decided to take a picture of the Sombrero Galaxy(M104). We experimented with the exposure times and decided on a basic colour filter. The exposure time we used was 120s but when we got the picture in return we were confused because it was mostly blue. After a bit of investigation we realised it had started to rain at the site of the telescope, and to protect the telescope lens they closed the dome. This meant the galaxy only went through the blue filter before it began to rain. Here it is on the the top of the entry after playing around on DS-9.
Unfortunately the picture wasn't as clear as we would have liked it to be but the dust lane was very prominent so it's a success for a first time try. We hope we have improved with our practice on the Real-Time Interface Demo and the demo's on the Faulkes Telescope support documentation so that next time the pictures will be clearer and greater in quantity.
This is a link to the support documentation and the Real Time Interface demo:
We recommend taking the online filter course as we found it very informative and helpful.
As our picture of the M104 was not of great quality we used the DS-9 software to change colour so that we could highlight possible hidden detail in the image. We have posted our favourite.
We discussed, throughout the day, what this project would involve,what careers there were in astronomy and basic questions about our universe and what a job in the astro-physics department would entail.
We completed this day very enthused and informed and eager to dive straight in.
Ciaran, Clara, David and Niamh.
An excellent start...well done!
ReplyDeleteI'm a physics technician who, along with the Astronomy/ physics teacher, is about to embark on using the Faulkes Telescope in our school, so it is great to be able to read about your experiences beforehand (it helps to get an idea of how it all goes, and if things go wrong...or right! :-)