Remote Control Astronomy

Beyond school classrooms

Photo courtesy of the Faulkes Telescope Project and Nik Szymanek A spiral galaxy about 35 million light years away, as seen by Faulkes Telescope North.

Since these telescopes are capable of visualising faint and distant objects in the universe, they are very useful for astronomy research. With a field of view of six arcminutes (or around 1/5th the size of the full moon), they are equipped with research-grade scientific instruments including Charged Coupled Device cameras and various filters. In 2005, when NASA fired a bullet into the comet Tempel-1, the first ground-based images returned to the public came not from NASA, but from the school students on Maui using FTN. Faulkes users have discovered new asteroids, observed supernovae, and regularly study Gamma-Ray Bursts and other mysterious phenomena at the forefront of astronomical research. FTN is the largest telescope in the world regularly observing Near Earth Objects - asteroids and comets that pass within a "mere" 3 million kilometres of our planet - and schools contribute valuable data to astronomers in the US who are tracking these potentially deadly objects.

In autumn 2005, the Faulkes Telescope Project became part of a much bigger project, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network. Their slogan is "We will always be able to keep you in the dark", and that is exactly what is planned - a network of robotic telescopes of different sizes, spread across the globe, with several in each hemisphere always in night time. The final research network will consist of 5 or 6 large telescopes (like the Faulkes Telescopes), intended primarily for science, but with opportunities for educational use. In addition, there will be two separate networks designed specifically for education: 10 intermediate telescopes that will be half the size of the Faulkes telescopes, and a further 20 to 30 smaller telescopes which will be roughly a quarter of the size of the Faulkes telescopes. These instruments will be scattered around the globe, allowing many countries to participate and providing a variety of sites located in different time zones and latitudes.