iTelescope is on Planetary Radio!
Planetary Radio is a weekly podcast that "visits with a scientist, engineer, project manager, astronaut, advocate or writer who provides a unique and exciting perspective on the exploration of our solar system and beyond".
It is one part of the Planetary Society, which is an amazing web site dedicated to "empowering the world's citizens to advance space science and exploration."
Planetary Radio is hosted by
Mat Kaplan and is joined by colleagues
Bill Nye the Science Guy,
Bruce Betts, and
Emily Lakdawalla, as well as weekly special Guests.
We are Excited to say that iTelescope is currently giving away free accounts via the Planetary Radio Trivia Contest that you can find on each
podcast's page!
Each account winner will be randomly selected from the submissions. Once a winner is chosen, we will set them up with a Plan-290 Sample Account with 200 iTelescope points.
We are very happy and thankful that Planetary Radio is allowing us to contribute and support such an amazing outreach program, and we hope you will listen to this fantastic radio broadcast show!
*image and logo courtesy of Planetary Society and Planetary Radio
Upcoming Maintenance and Software Upgrades
Over the next few weeks we will be shutting down each system for a night or two for the maintenance and preparation for upcoming software upgrades.
The first bit of maintenance is already underway and will consist of creating extensive Focus Profiles for each system. Initially this will involve simply creating new, high point count V-curve profiles for each system - many of which are already complete.
Following the V-curves, we will begin creating new, and much more accurate filter offsets for each system. This will take one or two nights for each system and will require the telescope to be offline most of, if not the entire, night.
These two items are a big part of the first major software upgrade that will be coming through, Adaptive Focus.
Adaptive Focus will be a new software system for our automatic focusers that is currently in testing on T21, T24, T18, T27, and T5. The software was originally created to assist with T24 as the focus was heavily effected by the very sharp ambient temperature drops as night falls at Sierra Remote Observatory.
This would lead to a lot of adjustments in the components as they cooled each night, which would lead to focus being lost regularly throughout the night.
This is where the Adaptive Focus comes in. It adjusts focus based on a variety of parameters from extensive focus profiles on each system, new, more accurate offsets, and a system that can react to temperature changes throughout the night.
For the most part, members will see very few changes in how their runs take place, but there are a couple things to be aware of.
First and foremost, the system will no longer have an initial focus run by default. Instead the system will try and focus in between member runs, and in the case that there is a large temperature drop during a run, it will focus mid run to ensure focus is not lost half way through.
This leads to an issue however, particularly for member's performing time based research. To assist there we will be adding two new options to the Plan Generator. The first will allow members to force focus at the beginning of the run (similar to how focus runs now). The other will tell the system to not focus during their run.
Along with these changes will be some much needed stability upgrades and bug fixes to two or our primary systems on the telescopes, ACP Control Software and AC, which is the software that allows all other programs to communicate with ACP.
These adjustments will not really have an impact that member's can see, but they will help things run much more smoothly in the background, allowing more software programs to be self reliant instead of depending on AC and ACP to do all the hard work for them.
The bottom line will be less issues where ACP loses connection to the mount, CCD, Focus, or generally just goes slow or crashes, which are the primary causes of reservation failure at the moment.
All of these upgrades will be rolling out over the next few months along with bug fixes to the Launchpad, Telescope home pages, reservation system and some of the email systems that have been malfunctioning lately.
Special Report: Back to the Beginning of Time
by Observatory Manager, Aussie Pete
The four most distant galaxies ever imaged with an amateur telescope!
Amateur astronomers and iTelescope members Josep Drudis and Christian Sasse have just imaged the four most distant objects ever seen with an amateur sized, off the shelf telescope. These four galaxies emitted light when the universe was only 760 million years old, or 6% of its present age - it was very very long ago, in fact they are looking back over 13 billion years!
Why did they do it? It was a cool idea - previous records were obtained on distant quasars - very bright compact galaxies. Redshift is a measure of distance since the further away an object is, the more it is redshifted.
This also means that the light emitted from a very distant galaxy is no longer visible to most cameras, its light has simply passed too far into the 'dark' red portion of the spectrum and is thus difficult to detect.
Drudis and Sasse wanted to go beyond a redshift of 7, and it was difficult to find suitable objects. They searched for and found four very distant galaxies and used T17 with its special camera and 400mm (17 inch) CDK optics located under ideal clear and cool skies at iTelescope's remote observatory at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia for this purpose. This CCD telescope combination could 'see' more into the red bandwidth of light.
T17 is a powerful amateur science platform. It is normally used for Science Missions, Deep Photometry, Narrowband and 'Extended Red' light IR imaging missions.
Clearly it was a challenging task for all involved, including dedicated ground staff. It takes many hours of careful aligning, testing and imaging required until the objects finally appeared. This result was somewhat unexpected and a pleasant surprise for all involved.
Below are images of the four galaxies. Drudis and Sasse are keen to continue and push the envelope of amateur imaging even further.
Member Showcase
The member showcase was created to give iTelescope.Net staff a chance to share member images with the entire community, and to show what can be done with robotic telescope systems. All images were originally posted to the iTelescope.Net Member's Club, our Facebook group page. We hope you enjoy this edition of the Member Showcase!
This month we are looking at an assortment of images from across the iTelescope network, and we are happy to say that we have two first time winners on this month's Member Showcase!
The first image I would like to share is from Mike Dougherty of our sister in the stars, Andromeda (M31). Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to our very own Milky Way and is the largest galaxy of the Local Group, which contains the Triangulum Galaxy and 44 other smaller galaxies in addition to the Milky Way and Andromeda.
One thing to note of great importance is that Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course with each other set to happen in about 4 billion years, which makes this target a great one to study as we head toward that eventual fate.
We are very happy to share Mike's fabulous image this month and hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
