Astronomy Club – Wednesday 2 February 2022
What a fantastic meeting we had yesterday! The astronomers (around 25 year 7-10 students) had their first remote observation session using the Faulkes Telescope Project, an exciting scheme to give school students a taste of professional astronomy using research grade equipment.
We had full control of the huge 2 metre Faulkes Telescope (North) situated at the top of Mount Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The online controls allowed students to input the catalogue name of an object, set the exposure time and take a photographic image (e.g. Messier 3, or M3, as pictured below). The half hour went very very quickly! But listening to the students’ reactions it was clearly very exciting watching the local webcam footage of the telescope moving to its new position, then waiting with baited breath for the image to appear in the preview window. You can see in the image ‘Using the telescope’ what we saw on the TV screen while using the robotic observatory.
There is a lot of data now to download and process so we can enjoy some pretty pictures, but a quick, low resolution example of what we captured is the image below of M3, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. This was the first target we chose – the star cluster is 33,920 light years from Earth!
We will have more remote observing sessions in future on this or one of the other telescopes available – it is such a huge, amazing opportunity to have the use of this facility, and access to it will certainly be useful to those students wanting to pursue physics and astronomy studies, as well as being a fantastic learning experience for anyone with an interest. Please speak to Mr J Gray (as opposed to Mr G Gray!) or Mrs Rowe if you’d like to know more.
