Recently the annual Siding Spring Open Day took place. There were several hundred people who were taken on tours around the LCOGT observatory by the observatory manager, Mark Willis.
A surprise visitor was Prof. Brian Schmidt, a distinguished astronomer and Nobel Prize winner in Physics. As a professional astronomer he was very keen to see the 2-meter Faulkes Telescope which has been involved in supernovae observations, which was the subject of his Nobel Prize for the discovery of Dark Energy. He was also very interested in seeing the two newly installed 1-meter telescopes. The new director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Warrick Couch, also took part in the tour with Brian Schmidt.
