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.

Fun with Domes (PART 1)

Over the last week or so I have been doing some investigating into the algorithms that control the positioning of the dome throughout the night. It has been a long journey full of pitfalls and surprises but it might be leading to better dome positioning from now on.

Some thoughts on schedulers

Over the years we have had many people present their views on how the telescope's scheduling system isn't working fairly. It's an interesting point for discussion so here I want to share my two cents on scheduling systems and how they work.