At the end of February one of the cameras on Faulkes Telescope North broke down. This was the main work-horse camera for this telescope and came as a blow to many scientists, and UK and Hawaii schools, who could not continue their programmes on FTN. We have been trying very hard to fix this camera but so far it is still causing problems. Fortunately FTN has a second camera which we were able to make available to education users at the end of March. I am pleased to say that it is working well and producing picturesque images.
Here are some excellent examples of the capabilities of the newly enabled camera (it is called Spectral but it is actually an imaging camera not a spectrograph). The public images appear much sharper on FTN compared to FTS but this is because the field of view is over twice the size; Hawaiian and UK schools using FTS will have a 4.6 x 4.6 arcminute field of view but when using FTN will have 10.36 x 10.22 arcminutes (if you would like to know more about this have a look at our pages on How Telescopes Work). The JPEG image files are scaled down to the same size, which makes the stars on FTN look much sharper. Click on the images to view the large versions.
If you are lucky enough to be using time on our 2m telescopes (either through Hawaii outreach programme or Faulkes Telescope Project), you will get better quality images with the longer observations. If you are not eligable for 2m time you can still enjoy the images (and raw data) from these telescopes. Why not explore our archive of observations.
You can view all the public images from FTN as soon as they are taken on our recent observations page for FTN - complete with Virtual Sky plugin showing where in the sky the objects which were observed lie.
