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

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.

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.

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.

Supernova in M82

There is an unusually nearby supernova in the Galaxy M82. It's bright and easy to observe, and M82 is a brilliant target at this time of year.

Object of the Month: The Crab Nebula (Messier 1)

On the 4th of July 1054, a bright new star appeared in the sky. Astronomers is China, Japan and across the Arab world took notice and of course it was heralded as an omen of great importance. This new star was a supernova explosion and while the initial glow faded long ago, the aftermath of this explosion is easily seen with a telescope: the crab nebula.

A BVR+Halpha image of the Crab Nebula

On the Fringes

I have been investigating some ways to further improve the automatic post-processing of images from the telescope. While I haven't really succeeded in that goal, the results are still interesting.This has to do with the swirling patterns seen on some images, particularly when imaged close to the horizon. In my previous post on flat-fields, these patterns were visible on the resulting image of M51.

Object of the Month: Comets

November is looking like the month for comets. With several prominent comets gracing our skies this month, we have developed a new comet targeting system, which allows you to easily take stunning images of these objects.

C/2012 S1 (ISON), Galaxy Cam

Massively Improved Flatfield System

The telescope has had flat fielding built into it for some time now in order to improve the quality of images we return. Today I fixed some problems with how those flat-fields are applied, which will improve images enormously.

Object of the Month: Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31)

The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest large galaxy to our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is 2.5 million light-years away from us (and closing, as it is projected to collide with us in about 4 billion years time). It is the brightest messier object in the sky, and due to it's size and close distance compared to other galaxies, also appears very large. Although our eyes are not sensitive enough to see the full extent of it, it actually appears 6 times larger than a full moon.

A colour image of Messier 32, Cluster Cam

Why we don't image below 30 degrees

We generally don't take images with Galaxy Cam lower than 30 degrees above the horizon. The reason for this is that on some nights there can be a lot of haze (and this is difficult to reliably detect). A picture I took last night with my camera demonstrates the effect this has on seeing.

Some Pictures of Galaxies

I've recently been trying to get some really nice pictures of galaxies by stacking together multiple exposures from the BRT. I'd like to share two that I have made so far.