However work continues on commissioning the new COAST and PIRATE facilities and you can see a short movie of their construction here:
PIRATE has been busy over the last month carrying out Open University student observations to determine the distance of star clusters and estimate their age, using photometric measurements of the cluster stars' brightness and colour.
We are working hard to get to the point of switching the telescope.org service to use the COAST telescope. Whilst the COAST telescope is now operational, we have a few issues to sort out before we can offer a full autonomous service. However, we are now looking for several experienced ART users who would like to take part in the commissioning phase of COAST by receiving data from the telescope and commenting on its quality in comparison to that obtained by ART in the past.
At this stage we can only supply raw target and calibration frames in FITS format - so if you do wish to take part then please make sure you are comfortable with the required data reduction and analysis techniques.
If you would like to take part then please contact us via the email address given on the contact us page. In the email please note your telescope.org username and give us a brief summary of the observations that you would like to carry out. Initially we plan to offer this service to a very limited number of users and selection will be based on the time required for and nature of the observations requested.
