November Progress Update

After last months brief period of observations we are sorry to report that the ART is still unable to perform autonomous observations due to continuing hardware faults.

PIRATE data contributes to Gaia follow up

This week's Gaia image of the week is a graph of a microlensing event, which many observatories around the world have been helping to follow up. Included among these is our newly commissioned PIRATE telescope, seen credited at the bottom.

http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/IoW_20161027

October Progress Update

Recently, after a successful service trip to Tenerife, some users with outstanding jobs in the ART queue had images returned. Over the nights of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of October approximately 300 images were taken autonomously.

September Progress Update

Work continues on trying to re-establish observations with the Autonomous Robotic Telescope (ART). On the night of Thursday 8th September a test run was carried out and a number of jobs were completed with Galaxy Cam. The images returned appeared to be of good quality, however further work is required on the alignment system of the telescope.

We hope to establish a fuller service soon and a service visit is scheduled for the end of September to aid in this effort.

August Progress Update

A team have visited the Teide Observatory to perform maintenance on the Autonomous Robotic Telescope (ART) and oversee the construction of the new facilities that will form the OpenScience Observatories.

Welcome back!

Welcome back to telescope.org. The website and the telescope have now completed the transfer to the Open University.

If you are a registered user who agreed to have your account transferred, you should find that your archive is as you left it.

If you have any problems with the use of the website or you account then please contact the telescope.org team.

Featured Object - The Needle Galaxy

Galaxies are often very faint objects. It can be difficult to see the fine detail without very long exposures. Not the case with edge-on galaxies. With the stars of the galaxy in-line, the galaxies appear much brighter (though with less area).

New Request Constructor

The most important part of interacting with the telescope in Tenerife - the request constructor - has just been upgraded. Over one year in development, this latest iteration should be quicker and easier to use, no matter what you are using the telescope to do.

Featured Object - Comet Lovejoy

Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy), now around its peak brightness of magnitude 5, can actually be seen with the naked eye. But using Cluster Camera gives a far better view.

20 Years of the Bradford Robotic Telescope

Not long ago was the 20th anniversary of the first Bradford Robotic Telescope. Since the 1990s, the University of Bradford has been leading the world in remote astronomy and we're still going strong today. In this post we reveal video clips from 1995 TV, hailing the then new robotic telescope.

Featured Object - The Flame Nebula

The object we'll be looking at this time is the Flame Nebula. This little know nebula is very easy to observe, in terms of its brightness and its size.

New Image Viewer Now Live

I am excited to present the very latest version of our online FITS editing tools, now live on the site for you to use. While other sites either provide a static jpeg or (sometimes) give you a FITS file, which you need specialist software to open, we are unique in offering a simple-to-use interface for editing your data, right in your web browser. Our newest, third generation FITS viewer is going to push the boundaries of what you thought was possible in a web page, and the first stage of the release is now live.

Object of the Month - Veil Nebula

The Veil Nebula is not an object that has traditionally been popular with the users of the BRT. I can only assume that this is because it's not very well known. With the right settings this object can produce quite nice images.

 

Master Dark and Bias Frames

In order to get a good image back from a CCD on the back of a telescope, there are a number of processes you have to put the image through to account for discrepancies and errors. These include applying bias and dark frames as well as flat fielding. We handle these for you automatically, but for those that like to do things by hand we are now producing master dark and bias frames for more advanced users to use.

A Guide to Filters

There are a wide range of filters available on our cameras. Different cameras have different filters. These filters have strange names, which may be confusing if you've never seen them before. I dedicate this post to explaining what these filters are and when to use them.

Object of the Month - The Milky Way

Our telescope is pretty uniquely capable of capturing images of the milky way in all its splendour thanks to the wide field cameras you are able to request images from. The only difficulty is working out what to point at, as the milky way takes up quite a lot of the sky. (Or all of it you could argue).

Object of the Month - Trifid Nebula

There is a lot of gas and dust in space. Most of it we can't see because both the dust and the background of space are very dark. Generally speaking, there are three different reasons we might get to see this dust. The Trifid Nebula (Messier 20) is a great showcase for this as it demonstrates all three in a single object. This also makes it an interesting object to try and image.

Fun with Domes (PART 4)

The dome pointing algorithm has so far been improved a good amount but there are still some things that can be done; things that require much more than merely tweaking some parameters.

Fun with Domes (PART 3)

This is where I start delving deeper into the mathematics behind the dome control algorithms. After all this it was a good week before I stopped having dreams about spherical polar coordinate transforms.

Fun with Domes (PART 2)

In my last blog post I talked about how I had started to investigate the positioning of the dome and I had found some areas of the sky where the galaxy camera was being obscured by the top of the dome.