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.

Great news and observations

We have been in contact with Edward Gomez of LCOGT these past few weeks, and we have just heard some very nice news. Our team have been contributing greatly to the microlensing project. We have had more success than the actual astronomers! We have been booking the telescope for around 2 o'clock as much as possible (it fits in with lunch and school well). This turns out to be a very lucky turn for us, as we seem to be observing with the clearest skies.

This has made us feel rather proud about our project, as we are just a small school group, but we have been contributing even more than we thought.

Our observing has also been smooth lately. However, with 98% humidity last Friday, and a weather warning today, it is unlikely that we will get our desired 25 pictures today.

There is still no word on the judging of the blog, so we shall continue as we have until we are told otherwise. Even now the judges may be looking at our blog, so we have been tightening things up, and hoping for good news.

Mixed Results

We have been using the Telescope for the past few days with mixed results. It has been raining a lot in Australia and there have been many other problems, see the example below. Despite this we finally managed to get a good few images on the Southern Telescope. We have learned a lot about observing over the last few weeks and are hoping for the best because the projects will be judged soon. We have been in contact with Edward Gomez from the LCOGT and he has helped us with our project which has been very challenging in many ways.

For the past week we have been cleaning up the blog, putting in pictures and checking spelling on the posts. School is finishing this week so a lot was happening (test etc.) It was hard to get the whole team in one place for our group photo and to get our observing time done every day. We still managed to get the observing done. This is one of the latest targets we observed (called MOA-2009-BLG-163) which was taken on the 28th of May

We hope to get more observing done over the next week or so. Our next session on the southern telescope is on Monday and we might have more news then.