Have you ever been just a little tempted to get into astrophotography, but then got put off by the apparent complexity and cost of setting it all up, having enough clear non-light-polluted nights to make it worthwhile and then dealing with all that image processing stuff?
Well, you can now easily dip your toe into this fascinating area of our hobby for not such a great outlay (and in some circumstances absolutely free!) using top range facilities and equipment. Seriously top range equipment – like a 2 meter telescope in Australia! And all of this from the comfort of your own living room! Pete Wiliamson’s relaxed and informative talk to this well attended meeting provided plenty of motivation to at least have a go at remote imaging.
He started with the iTelescope network where 18 online telescopes in countries such as Australia, South America and New Mexico are available for hire over the internet. Select your target, find an appropriate telescope, tell it how many exposures of what duration and with which filters you desire, then let the instrument get on with it. When it’s done it will send you your images, all calibrated, ready for you to put together at home. Yes, you pay for credits for all of this, but it’s a lot cheaper than buying your own rig.
Mr Williamson then went on to encourage us as an Educational Charity to get involved with the Faulkes Telescope Project It provides access to 1,500 hours of observing time on two 2-metre class telescopes located in Hawaii and Australia. Students and teachers can then go online and book time on the telescope and run their own 29-minute-long real-time observational session on one of the telescopes, remotely controlling it over the internet. These telescopes are the largest robotic telescopes in the world available for UK schools to control in real time. There are several projects in which school children can get involved – for example exoplanet discovery and galaxy searching.
In addition, it is possible for anyone to obtain actual image data from a number of space missions, for example Juno, Cassini and Hubble.
And the results of this were dramatically demonstrated by Mr Williamson with images of many astronomical favourites, particularly southern hemisphere objects like Eta Carina, Omega Centauri and the Magellanic Clouds. The exposure times for some of the images he showed were jaw-droppingly short. 3 seconds for the Ring Nebula (M57) for example – and that was 1 second each for Red, Green and Blue!! That’s what a 2 meter telescope can do for you and the cost of 3 seconds of imaging time is really very small!
One of our members is now signing up for the Faulkes Telescope Project for his school. Pete Williamson’s time was evidently well spent!
Sandy Giles