Through to the finals!

We have just heard that we have got through to the final stage of the competition! This final will hopefully be judged in November, so this means we have a few more months to get more work done on the project before the end. We will be taking a three week break from working on our project because we are all either on holidays or at the Gaeltacht (The Gaeltacht, or Irish college, is a summer camp where students go to certain all Irish speaking parts of the country to practice their Irish. Generally the students spend 3-4 weeks at the college.)so observing will be impossible.

We have already posted a blog explaining about our plan to observe Pluto, however we have still been unable to do so because of bad weather and computer problems. We hope to get an image as soon as possible when we come back after our break.

There is also some more good news. We received a comment on our first blog entry from Dr. Micheal McKay on June 19, but we only noticed it now. Dr. McKay works in the Human Spaceflight Operations & External Projects Department, at the European Space Agency. He kindly praised our work and says he will be using our work as an example for other schools. This has given us another great boost. Dr.McKay has been Flight Operations Director for Mars and Lunar missions. We wish to thank him for this feedback, and feel honored by his praise.

Pluto's Rotational Lightcurve

As part of the BAA (British Astronomical Association) to determine Pluto's rotational lightcurve the schools taking part in the Faulkes challenge have been asked to use a small part of their observing session to image Pluto.


Pluto's rotational lightcurve hasn't been observed since it was studied in 1995 by the Hubble Telescope. Since that time a dwarf planet has moved further away from the sun and there are indications that the cooling of the planet may have caused a change in the atmosphere and/or weather on Pluto, which might very well be visible if the rotational lightcurve is measured. This particular dwarf planet is a very slow rotator taking about 6.4 days to turn once.

The group of astronomers in charge of the faulkes telescope want us to take one RGB image to go towards their research. An RGB image, sometimes referred to as a truecolour image, is a method a taking a picture that defines red, green, and blue color components for each individual pixel. RGB images do not use a palette. The color of each pixel is determined by the combination of the red, green, and blue intensities stored in each color plane at the pixel's location. Which means that they take 1 red, 1 green and 1 blue picture and mix them together to get the real colours.

We attempted to take a picture of Pluto but, unfortunately, the telescope was closed due to bad weather. We will try again during our next session if we are granted more time. It was very exciting and an honor to be asked to help the BAA's campaign and research and we hope to post our picture of Pluto as soon as possible.

This is a good site with information on pluto