Faulkes Imaging by Bristol Astronomical Society
The Faulkes Telescope Project is the education arm of Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN). Its aim is to provide free access to robotic telescopes and a fully supported education programme to encourage students and teachers to engage in research-based science education. Access to these resources is provided at no charge to teachers and students.
Full details of the Faulkes project can be found at http://faulkes-telescope.com/
Bristol Astronomical Society first became involved with the Faulkes Telescope
team at the beginning of 2006 as part of a project on galaxy classification that we were undertaking with junior members of the Society.
For this project we imaged various galaxies including interacting galaxies such as the Antennae and NGC2207, and other bright spirals such as M100 where we were just 4 days too early to catch a supernova!
Spurred on by our successful capture of these images we decided to focus on compact groups of galaxies and, by chance, selected a couple from the Hickson catalogue. This led to discussions with the Faulkes team at Cardiff on the possibility of joining a project to image in colour as many of the Hickson galaxies as possible.
Many of these groups are far more challenging than the initial galaxy project and tested to the limit our image processing skills, which had hitherto be based primarily on webcam and digital SLR imaging.. A complete list of the 100 or so Hickson groups was displayed on our notice board on club nights and members asked to ‘sponsor’ one or more groups. Each sponsor was asked to provide details of the group and the exposures and filters required to capture the image. Since most of the club members were unfamiliar with image processing software a couple of club nights were devoted to imaging tutorials using image processing software such as Iris, Photoshop, Gimp and others.
All of our imaging using the Faulkes telescopes is done off-line, i.e. we submit a request detailing the objects and the exposures required and we receive back raw Fits data for subsequent processing by club members
It was soon obvious that creating great images from the raw data was a
challenge that not everyone wanted to partake in, so a small and enthusiastic band of members formed an imaging sub group. This group does not confine itself to Faulkes images alone, but includes webcam, DSLR and CCD imaging. Software ranges from freeware such as Registax and Iris to professional packages such as Maxim DL and Photoshop. The aim of the group is to share imaging tips and skills in order to improve the overall imaging capabilities of the group.
Within this group we have now processed nearly two dozen sets of images from the Faulkes team to date, most of which have been Hickson groups. At one point we though we may have even discovered a new supernova in Hickson 51b (HCG51b), but alas it was later seen to be a star that was faint enough not to be on most star atlases, but happened to be in the line of
sight of the galaxy.
We were also very honoured to have some of our processed Hickson images published in a paper entitled "Faulkes Telescope North Observations of Hickson Groups of Interacting Galaxies"
(F.Lewis, P.Roche, S. Roberts, N.Szymanek, and Bristol Astronomical Society) as part of the goal to produce multi-colour online version of the Hickson atlas.
The society has put on display many of the images during outreach events
such as the annual Bristol Festival of Nature events, bringing astronomy
and the beauty of these elusive objects to the public eye. Many of these images can also be found in the Images section of the Bristol Astrosoc website at http://www.bristolastrosoc.org.uk/gallery/
We are indebted to the Faulkes team for their support and the opportunity and impetus it has given to our members to participate in such a challenging and exciting aspect of our hobby.
Summary of helpful links
Below is a list of useful links
Hickson Paper:
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept01/Hickson/Hickson_contents.html
Astronomical databases and catalogues used to find relevant data of specific objects:
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/sim-fid.plmepage
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/tutorials/cds.gml/
The Faulkes Telescope homepage:
http://www.faulkes-telescope.com/
Use of the Gimp:
The Gimp for Windows: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
Gimp tutorials: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/
Gimp manual (HTML use on line): http://docs.gimp.org/en/
Planetarium software - Cartes Du Ciel: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/