During this week (7 - 9 January 2014) BBC have been showing the latest in their annual series of live space and astronomy programmes on UK television, called Stargazing LIVE. The programmes are hosted by particle physicist and presenter Brian Cox and comedian Dara Ó Briain (who hosted our first Show Me Stars twitter event in 2011).
The themes this year have been observing aurorea, space exploration and finding galaxies (courtesy of the Zooniverse project, Space Warps) using an effect called gravitational lensing. LCOGT have contributed a series of galaxy images one of which, M51, was featured on the TV programme.
These galaxies were automatically observed by our intelligent, robotic scheduler and mostly took place on our 1-meter telescope at McDonald Observatory, on the same day as they were shown on TV. Below are the images. Hover over the polaroids to make them larger, click to make them full size.
- [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_small","fid":"1952","attributes":{"class":"media-image","height":"144","id":"2","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"144"}}]]M51 & NGC5195
Spiral galaxy interacting with the dwarf galaxy - [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_small","fid":"1953","attributes":{"class":"media-image","height":"144","id":"2","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"144"}}]]NGC2093
Barred spiral galaxy - [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_small","fid":"1954","attributes":{"class":"media-image","height":"144","id":"2","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"144"}}]]NGC4038
The Mice, an interacting pair of galaxies - [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_small","fid":"1955","attributes":{"class":"media-image","height":"144","id":"2","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"144"}}]]NGC1232
Spiral Galaxy - [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_small","fid":"1956","attributes":{"class":"media-image","height":"144","id":"2","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"144"}}]]M82
Starburst galaxy
Thanks to our intern Jake Hughes (Cardiff University) for help with the image processing.
