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Astrophotography with a remote telescope

By Gurbir Dated: November 17, 2022 Leave a Comment

Open University’s COAST telescope on Teneriffe

The best location for an astronomical telescope is on the top of a mountain. Remote, cold and a pain to get to. But with an internet connection – you can “work from home”.

During the summer, I signed up for a free Open University course called Astronomy with an online Telescope. With it you get access to a telescope on mount Tiede on the Island of Tenerife for 6 months.

This professional grade telescope COAST (COmpletely Autonomous Survey Telescope) consists of a 17 inch f/6.8 Corrected Dall-Kirkham Astrograph telescope (a PlaneWave CDK17), is equipped with an FLI ProLine KAF-0900 CCD camera, broadband and narrow-band filters, also mounted on a GM4000. You pick which objects you want to image and select filters. A few days later, you receive an email that the image is ready for download.

The OU course is free and explains how to use the telescope as well as the many aspects of basic astronomy. The course is online, free and available right now. Some of my images are below. Click for a larger version.

Black Friday discounts – 33% and 66% discount

By Gurbir Dated: November 17, 2022 Leave a Comment

Use the voucher codes below

BF2022_virtual for 66% discount on all ebooks
BF2022_physical for 33% discount on all paperback and hardback

1. Select the appropriate format (ebook or hard/paperback) or Ebook.
2. Add to basket
3. View the basket and enter one of the two voucher codes

Valid until midnight on 3oth November 2022. Only via the links below

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Episode 106 – ESA’s new science missions

By Gurbir Dated: November 11, 2022 Leave a Comment

European Space Agency’s Dr Paul McNamara was studying low-frequency gravitational waves just before they were discovered in 2015. Now he is the astronomy and astrophysics coordinator for the European Space Agency. In this interview, recorded in Athens during Cospar2022, he speaks about some of the exciting science missions that ESA will be launching later this decade.

These missions include

Juice – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer
Euclid – To explore dark matter and dark energy
Plato – The next-generation planet-hunting mission
Ariel – A UK-led mission to explore the atmospheres of exoplanets

He also talks about ESA’s publicly available resources especially useful to science educators. Planetary Science Archive and ESA Sky. They are available to anyone, in or outside Europe and without charge. Links are available on this episode’s web page.

Dr Paul McNamara

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:00 — 98.4MB) | Embed

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Episode 105 – Return to Titan – Dragonfly

By Gurbir Dated: November 4, 2022 Leave a Comment

NASA’s Cassini-Huygens lander arrived at Titan on 14th January 2005. The first instrument to make contact with the surface of Titan was a penetrometer made by Ralph Lorenz. Since then he has gone on to write many books and work on several other projects.

In this episode, he speaks about some of those projects, especially Dragonfly, a return mission to land on Titan. This mission, for which he is the mission architect, is like no other. It is not really a lander or rover but a quadcopter that will sample different regions near the landing site during its 3.3-year lifetime. Ralph talks about what we can expect from Dragonfly which launches in 2027 and arrives at Titan in 1934.

The documentary Destination Titan we refer to in this discussion is available here is available on Youtube here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:04 — 50.4MB) | Embed

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