Overall project summary

This blog entry is a summary of all the work we have done over the two months of our project. There will be one or two more entries after this, but as the blog will be judged by the end of June, we feel it is important for this entry to be posted as soon as possible. We will also continue to observe as regularly as possible, so the following estimates of the work we have done will continue to increase.


We started our project early in May and after a training session with our mentor Greg Hallinan from NUIG we made our first observation on May 11th with the Faulkes Telescope.

We managed to get a total of 14 hours of actual observations done, almost equal in May and June. We were unable to observe about 13 hours of observation time which we had booked, due to the bad weather and telescope malfunctions. During that time we observed just under 20 microlensing targets and made 165 individual observations.

We have 15 blog posts so far. It is impossible to estimate the time we have spent on the blog, as we work on it in our own time, as well as in a group. As we have said before, the blog is divided into 2 aspects: writing the entries and IT. We have all spent a considerable length of time on our blog, especially since we had no previous experience with blogs before.

We have also received an email from the Faulkes Telescope mailing list asking school groups to help with another project involving Pluto. We will post a separate entry to explain our small part in this project.

Our project for this challenge has also been a part of the LCOGT microlensing project. This has been quite enjoyable and a great experience.

So, that is a basic summary of our project so far. It is now time to thank everyone again. Special Thanks to Mr. Ryder and Ms. Herbert for getting us involved in this project. A very important thank you to Gregg Hallinan for choosing such an interesting project that is part of a much larger world wide project. A big thank you to Yiannis Tsapras and Edward Gomez of LCOGT for contacting us, providing support, and helping us with our problems regarding the microlensing targets and lightcurves.