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.

Some Lightcurve Results

We have been taking pictures of microlensing targets for 2 months now and in this blog we will show the results of some of our observations on the lightcurve for one of our targets (KB-09-232).

Here is this target's lightcurve before we made our observations, on 11 June 2009


And here it is on 19 June 2009, after we made our observations


The arrows on the graph point out what our group contributed are highlighted in this image. They are shown as blue dots (H- Faulkes North Telescope) and dark green dots (I- Faulkes South Telescope).


The other points on the lightcurve are from observations made by other groups using different telescopes from around the world. The different colour letters on the right hand side of the graph show which points came from which group or telescope. Here is a list of the groups/telescopes and the letter which represents it:

Surveys (groups):
O(OGLE)
K(MOA)

Follow-up (Telescopes):
Z(Danish 1.54m)
A(SAAO 1.0m)
C(CTIO 1.3m)

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.

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

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.

The impact of weather on astronomy!

For the past few days it has been raining constantly in Australia and this has denied us access to the telescope. We are using optical telescopes rather than radio or space telescopes. Radio telecopes (which don't rely on visual light) are barely affected by weather and space telescopes aren't affected at all (obviously!). So, we are doing a juggling act with the weather, the visibility of the target and the proper functioning of the telescope. But we have high hopes for today as there is very good weather and as far as we can tell the telescope is working fine.

Observations interrupted

We received an email from Yiannis Tsapras, a research astronomer from LCOGT, explaining that no one could observe last Thursday due to a software incompatability. So we were not alone!

For the past few days our observations have been interrupted. Yesterday, having booked the Hawaiian telescope, we were unable to use the telescope due to bad weather conditions. Today, we were first unable to find a computer, or one with steady internet access. Now, we have also just learned we would not have been able to observe anyway, because it was raining again!

So, we have been in a rut for 5 days. Encountering errors and bad weather has meant we've been sitting at our computers, unable to do research for our project.

Once this is fixed, we will be coming up with a rota for observing. But as things have been slow, we haven't been able to arrange anything properly.

Hopefully with the next post, we will have better news.

Light curves, good news and bad news

Hello, I'm just going to pick up from where we left off in our last blog, and talk about the light curves. But first, some good news!

The LCOGT (Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network) have been in contact with us. They are the group which provide our Microlensing Targets, and collect all the data from the observations, then put them into Light Curve Graphs. They have offered to help us with our project, and we can help them with theirs. They seem very happy that a school group is involved in the search for new planets, and would like to improve their system as much as possible.

This is great news for us, as even being in contact with astronomers from such a group is an honor. We will be replying to their e-mails tomorrow, and we hope that we can learn a lot from them.

Now onto the Light Curves.
A light curve graph maps out the brightness of the star during the microlensing event. The light gets brighter, then dims in a steady curve. However, if there is a sudden change to that light, a blip occurs on the graph, and it means you have just found a planet. The change in brightness due to a planet, can last anything from half an hour to a day, depending on how fast it orbits the star. Here is a great example of what this blip looks like.

And, to show our work on this project, we hope to be able to upload examples of Light Curves before and after we submit our data.


Now, on to the bad news.
We were supposed to observe for an hour today, but we were unable to do so as an "unusual error" was occurring. We could move the telescope to point at the right place, but couldn't do anything after that.

We thought it might have been the weather (as the telescope is designed to automatically close if it rains) so we checked the weather status. However the humidity, temperature and wind were all reasonable, and we could see no reason for the error to be caused by weather.

We stayed there for almost all of the hour, in case it worked again. We tried looking at various different things, and we couldn't use it at all. We are all fairly disappointed about this, as it cuts into our observing time greatly.

Also, the telescope is completely booked out for the weekend, so we have to wait until next Monday to observe! But we will just have to work on another aspect of the project until then.

Observations and light curves

Yesterday and today we have been using and observing with the Southern Faulkes telescope. Above is a product of our microlensing experiment. However, there have been a few hiccups along the way...
The first problem was confusing Greenwich Time with Greenwich Summer Time. When we booked the telescope, the time was UTC(coordinated universal time) . We found out that UTC is the same as Greenwich, but we aren't Greenwich. We're Greenwich Summer Time. We also learned about the Julian Day system. Every day in every calendar is unified by the Julian Day. Today is JD 2454964. It is a simple way for astronomers to stop confusion when talking about dates using different calendars.
To read more...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

So, all that means is we had an extra hour to prepare.
We checked out the OGLE recommended target list to find out what we'd be observing, and the exposure times for each target, etc. From there we also got a star finder map with the the light curves made up from other astronomers data. Our observations of the targets from the OGLE list are automatically transferred to the light curves, if the targets names are entered correctly. We hope that a planetary microlensing event will occur during our time observing.
We also had to check to see if the stars were visible at the time. We used the Staralt website to do this.
This website is very useful as it tells you when the stars are visible, and where in relation to the moon they are. This is important, because if the moon is too close, the telescope will not let you observe. It can also change the quality of of the observations.

When we took control, we started out filling in (accurately) the RA and DEC (like the longitude and latitude of the sky) and the OGLE name of the target. Then we move the telescope to point at the coordinates. We select the filter - Filter i'- and we chose the exposure times. They were mostly around 3 seconds, so it didn't take long. We re-exposed each target 3 times before moving on. This provides an even more accurate reading of the star.

On the Light Curve an accurate reading is a point, but when inaccurate, there is a line with the potential error. We hope to avoid this, as we are using a very strong telescope.

Today, however, we were unable to access the most recent target list, so our readings may not be as useful over all, but we coped with the various problems (internet access down, no target list) well. We also had enough time to make 25 observations, so we are pleased with the outcome.

We have also been granted our request for extra time. As part of our project we are allocated 90 minutes of telescope time, in 30 minute slots. However our project requires a lot of time, so we now have an extra 120 minutes.