Report for Life Cycle of Stars Observing day on 23rd May 2007

Aim

The whole observing night (0830 - 1359 UTC) of 23rd May was dedicated to obtaining images to create a poster based around the Life Cycle of Stars. Each image showed examples of stars in different stages of their lives.

The sessions were booked up by myself and advertised on the website to users who wanted to be involved in the project; users then booked sessions by email requesting which ever session they wanted.

I gave each school two objects to observe and advised them as to which filters and exposure time they could use. I provided a "skeleton" of the poster so that users could see what it will look like (excluding the actual images).

I also provided a selection of editable formats of the poster so that users could insert their images using different software packages.

Due to the problems with the availability of the FITS files during the last themed day, I did not plan to do anything with the FITS files on-the-fly as they came in.

Comments

Observing

It was positive to see that all the users knew what they were doing (what objects they were to observe, filters and exposure times to use etc.), unfortunately, the performance of the telescope did not live up to our expectations.

Due to various problems, when a user made an observation instead of them seeing their JPEG image; they got an error message saying that their exposure had failed. Before we were able to contact the users, the first few were put off by this and gave up on the observations completely (assuming that the observations were indeed failing). In truth the observations were been completed and the FITS files were being produced, the users just weren't seeing anything.

See the comments made by a teacher in the User Comments section below about this issue.

Processing

On the whole, I felt the final poster was pretty good but the following issues affected the image quality:

1. For most of the observing day there was some considerable cloud about. Obviously this cannot be planned for but was a limiting factor.
2. The telescope pointing was a little bit out on most of the images so all the objects appeared off centre. This didn't cause any problems with the actual image quality but it does take the edge out of the images slightly.

However, considering the points above I am pleased with the final product that we achieved.

Evaluation

The weather issue above obviously cannot be accounted for.

The issues raised about the telescope performance have been passed over to the engineers in the US, so we are hoping to see many improvements for our next observing day.

User Contributions

The other small issue that has been noticed is that of user contributions; out of everyone who took part in both observing days (M101 mosaic and LCS) haven't yet sent me any images that they have produced.

For the mosaics, I can imagine that taking the images during a lesson is quite easy to organise. You just do a special level with the students you have in front of you.... but to then get the data and do a mosaic is not easy. First you need computers, then you need to learn how to do it, you need to probably get the same students back etc... and at the end of the day, its a lot of work when you have already have the fun of using the telescope. So although schools got something out of being involved, and probably talked about M101 and what a mosaic did, there was no actual school produced material.

For the LCS poster there is an even more obvious issue. The topic was LCS but the potential school activity was actually image processing; so there is a mismatch there. I am sure the schools talked about stars etc... but image processing is not the same topic.

I hope to get more users sending in their produce by making sure the theme of the day is more closely aligned with the tasks also.

I'm looking forward to the contributions mentioned by Glenlola Collegiate School see the User Comments section below for more details.

User Comments

The image of M57 is being placed on our school website, with a link to the Faulkes website/poster. We have also written an article for the school newsletter and the image has been enlarged and displayed on noticeboards throughout school.

The two girls involved will receive merit awards for their participation in the day. I will pass on the newsletter article to you once the girls have written it. Thank you so much for the 'cleaning up' exercise after the session that allowed us to access images; the girls were disappointed on the day and will be delighted to see the poster."

Glenlola Collegiate School

Many thanks to Glenlola Collegiate School, their newsletter article will be available once it has been written.

"It was very worthwhile and being part of a collaboration with other schools made it seem more like real science to the pupils taking part. Seeing the poster on the website also provoked lots of comment. Doing something that has an end product outside school

again makes it seem more like 'real' science. It was my first themed observing day and I would definitely volunteer again."

Radley College

Here is a more detailed report from a teacher who ran the session with some of his students:

"We ran our Faulkes session with a group of five pupils (our 'observatory
team'), one teacher and a member of the local astronomical society. A
year 10 pupil operated the telescope.

We did not mind the lack of immediate jpegs and were prepared to wait
for the fits files. However, the telescope was responding slowly to slew
instructions or not at all. We just could not get it to point at M57, so
we used our initiative and switched to another planetary nebula.
Unfortunately, because imaging was also slower than usual we only got R
and V passes for this object (we did them separately knowing that a full
colour pass might not be completed in time).

Nevertheless, everyone was happy that we had achieved something and we
waited for the fits files. We took the files for M80 from the initial
list (before they went on to the FT site proper) and began working on
them. The resulting image was a little off colour and we later
discovered that we didn't have the RGB images in the right order and
therefore coloured correctly. This was because we were unaware that a
previous school was also asked to get M80 and we had accidentally
grabbed an image from the tail end of their list, i.e. we started in the
wrong place, RGB-wise. Obviously, this shouldn't happen again.

No matter, we have redone the M80 image, although it is nothing like as
good as the one posted on the FT site. I also took the liberty of
passing the M80 fits files to the Open University astronomy community
and one person has sent back their RGB composite.

We would certainly like to take part in further themed sessions and
would like to be able to use some of the resultant images for the
astronomy section of the school magazine. The official poster was most
impressive by the way."

Monmouth School