FT Team in sunny Spain!

In July this year, Dr Sarah Roberts and Vanessa Stroud from the Faulkes Telescope Project were invited to speak at Complutense University’s annual summer course programme as part of the Galileo Teacher Training Programme (GTTP). Held in El Escorial near Madrid, the summer courses attract almost 6000 students every year, not just from Spain but from around the world. Courses available in the University programme range from Politics and social science to communication and astronomy education.

Over the course of 4 days, the 30 teachers who chose to attend the GTTP astronomy education course heard talks on using robotic telescopes in Spain, asteroids and dinosaurs, and were shown how to use SalsaJ software to analyse telescope data. Sarah gave a presentation on the Faulkes Telescope Project and spoke about the educational projects which are being carried out whilst Vanessa gave a demonstration on how to use the telescope and how to access the data and plot a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of an open cluster. For Sarah, the workshop was a crash-course in Spanish, as all other talks to the Spanish and Colombian teachers were given in Spanish (including Vanessa’s)!

A trip to the Spanish robotic observatory Astro Hita in Toledo was one of the highlights of the workshop, with teachers (and speakers) being able to use the telescopes at the observatory to view the Spanish night sky. Although it was rather a late night (or early morning!), everyone was impressed at the determination and achievements of Faustino Organero, who began work on building both the observatory buildings and telescopes in 1999. Today, the observatory houses a 77cm, 40cm and 30cm reflecting telescope which can all be accessed over the internet for education.