The Whirlpool

This image has been produced by Alex Terris, by data gathered from the Mons telescope in Izana, Tenerife during an astronomy field-trip.

There are two galaxies in the image which are interacting. The larger one is M51. They are probably merging. Alex's team took four images using different filters and then combined them all to get this colour image.

The bluer bits show areas where star formation is taking place in the spiral arms. These areas are blue because there are young, massive stars which are hotter and therefore bluer.

In physics blue is hotter than red! Just like your bunsen burner - the hotter part of the flame is the blue part.

The other students in the team who worked on obtaining the images were: Hannah Calcutt, James Pettler and Claire longbottom - assisted by project supervisor Dr Andrea Dieball.

Where did the Rosette Nebula go?

The Astronomy students panicked slightly when the fantastic image that they saw a couple of nights ago of the Rosette Nebula, didn't seem to match the image that they got through the IAC80 telescope at the Observatory in Teide, today. This is a finder chart taken from the Simbad database.

Happily they found out that the object that they were focused on was in the correct region, but was just a few arcminutes out. The Rosette is really very big - the nebula is almost a degree across - very large in astronomical terms. In astronomy widths of objects are usually measured in arcminutes or arcseconds -1/60 or 1/360 of a degree. For the Rosette Nebula - which is approximately 5,200 Light Years away - a degree translates as 130 Light Years across - that is it would take 130 years traveling at the speed of light (1,079,252,849 km/h) to cross from one side of the nebula to the other and it would take us 5,200 light years to get there.

The students also worried that the nebula had disappeared below the limit of the telescope, however the altitude their programme was using to determine the position of the nebula above the horizon was incorrect, placing us and the telescope in the centre of the volcano, rather than on the top of the mountain at the Teide Observatory. The students soon realized the mistake - because the IAC80 is such a clever telescope it informed them that their nebula was still high enough up in the sky to observe. Panic over and back to work.

Images have been taken by the IAC80 telescope by the Astronomy Students; Hannah Calcutt, Alex Terris, James Pettler and Claire longbottom - assisted by project supervisor Dr Andrea Dieball and Santiago the telescope operator.

Where, When, What, Why?

Astronomy - I think I'm getting the hang of it, there's a lot of maths and physics involved in working out how to locate your objects in the sky; not only is the earth moving, but everything else is moving too, so making sure that you can find things 'up there' from second-to-second is very challenging.

Astronomers are interested in how old astronomical 'objects' are, how large they are, how heavy they are, how old they are, how far away they are and once they can determine all this information - they can tell us a lot about where we are, what we're made of and where we are going.

The process of getting all this information is rather challenging, as well as mind-blowing. While I am currently sitting in what looks like the control room in the Starship Enterprise, and it's not too cold (we are, after all, up a mountain, above the clouds and it's close to freezing) - I'm about to go outside in the pitch black to try to find my way to the Meade telescope which is on a tripod in the open air - and take a photo of star trails - which will take a 30 minute exposure, outside, in the cold.

While for the astronomers it's a lot more than just taking pretty pictures - that's exactly what I'm hoping to get!

Star Struck

The images below from the Simbad astronomical database are shown in the 'negative' so that you can see the stars more clearly!

The image below is of the Cigar Nebula - or M82 by its Messier Catalogue number. The Catalogue is a list of 110 'objects' most of which were compiled by Charles Messier in 1781. On star charts Messier's objects are shown with the letter 'M'� before each number.











This is the Beehive Cluster - or M44.








And the M58 Barred Spiral Galaxy.








Images of the above objects are currently being taken, using the IAC80 telescope, by the Astronomy Students; Hannah Calcutt, Alex Terris, James Pettler and Claire longbottom - assisted by project supervisor Dr Andrea Dieball and Santiago, the telescope operator.

The Fabulous IAC80

The IAC80 Telescope at the Tenerife Observatory, Teide is rather fabulous, in comparison to the older Mons telescope. The IAC80 has an 80cm reflector, so can see deeper into the sky.

Our students are using the telescope for their research projects which include looking at the Rosetta, bowtie and Eagle Nebulae, planets, globular and open clusters and spiral galaxies.

The challenge for the students tonight is to ensure that they all have observing time - as the eight students all want to observe different, er, things ('objects´ is the correct astronomical term). Each of the objects the students want to observe will be rising and falling in the sky at different times so they are having to plan who does what, when. It is a race against time.

The telescope has an enormous CCD camera attached to it which is cooled to minus 100 degrees to prevent it overheating. The camera which takes the photos/data has thousands of pixels which aren't 100% reliable. In order to prevent astronomers thinking that they are looking at a star - when they are just looking at a burnt out pixel, the astronomers have to take 'darks' - basically photos with the lens cap on - to use as a reference.

To make things more complicated the astronomers use filters on their telescopes to ensure that they get a clear picture of the object they are focused on, or rather different types of information such as star formation regions and star type. Each student will want a different filter - or rather sets of filters - to ensure that they get the data that they want. Each filter has to be tested individually by producing 'dome flats' - that's images of the dome through the filter - again as a reference point to check the reliability of the filters, mirrors and lenses in the telescope. The exposure times for these flats are going to be between ten seconds and ten minutes each.

It's my last night tonight and I'm going to watch the students observing throughout the night.

http://www.iac.es/eno.php?op1=3&op2=6&lang=en

The Mons

The Mons reflecting telescope at the Observatorio del Teide in Izaña Tenerife, is 50cm in diameter, was built in 1972 and is operated by the University of Mons, Belgium.









The observatory is part of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, an international research centre in Tenerife and students from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton are here for a week on a research field-trip.










Dr Christian Knigge, Supervisor on the field-trip is shown here demonstrating how to use the telescope - which takes four or five people to operate it - it's a bit of a beast.

The Astronomers - The Balloon Man

Professor Tony Dean, member of staff at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton and director and superviser on the Tenerife astronomy field trip - was one of the original proposers for the INTEGRAL space mission.

Tony Dean's research is in 'High energy astrophysics' using gamma-ray astronomy to study Active Galactic Nuclei, neutron stars and black hole systems. He is also interested in gamma-ray telescopes.

Tony has a background working with balloon-mounted telescopes - weighing up to 2 tonnes. The enormous balloons pulled the telescopes up into the stratosphere to observe at gamma-rays.

Tony was in charge of the first week of our two-week field trip to Tenerife, working in collaboration with students from the Universidad de La Laguna.








One of the students in Tony's team said 'we're so lucky to have him supervise our project because he's able to advise us on all areas that we need help with - he is able to help with all the science and engineering and has a lot of experience with giving presentations too!'

While I was sleeping...

I wouldn't be terribly suprised if the astronomy students on their field trip to the Izana observatory in Tenerife don't particularly want to share their hard-earned data/images with me, because I slept while they worked throughout the night.

Luckily, the staff members are still talking to me and they told me what the students observed through the University of Mons and IAC80 telescopes; the students got good images of Jupiter's moons, saturn, the M61 and M27 galaxies and M16, the Eagle Nebula.

These aren´t, of course, the students' images, but just in case they won't give them to me...

Inspiring!

Last night I looked through Simone's huge binoculars at the Orion nebula. You can just about see the nebula which is below Orion's belt. The nebula is also called M42 and is shown in the illustration below. The nebula is approximately 1,270 light years away and is about 24 light years across. It was beautiful- couldn't believe what I was seeing.



A nebula is a cloud of dust, hydrogen gas and plasma. It is the first stage of a star's cycle. In a nebula gas, dust and other materials 'clump' together to form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually it will become big enough to form stars. The remaining materials are then believed to form planets.

Night Lunch!

Astronomers are made of sterner stuff than I. It's cold on the mountain where we are observing. No, I mean it, it's really cold; I wore all of the clothes that I'd brought along for the 10-day trip last night and I was still cold; I was also the only one who complained about the cold too - I tried not to, but I just couldn't help myself.

As a holographer who has done some of her best work at 2 in the morning I understand how one can get caught up in one's work and stay up really late, however I just couldn't keep up with the Astronomers and wussed out at 1.30am last night/this morning and went to bed.

I got up bright and early and met the students and staff coming back from their night's observing; oh the shame of it - I have undoubtably lost everyone's respect now and will have to do something spectacular to make up for it. Perhaps if I spend all of the day researching astronomy basics to find out what it means to calculate the radius of a globular cluster - which is what Alex Terris, one of the students, wanted to do for his research project - then stay up all tonight without night-lunch (the use of copious amounts of sugar and chocolate to counter the body's overwhelming demand for sleep -even while standing up- during astronomical research) not for any 'holier-than-thou', anti-junkfood sentiment mind, but because I can't eat refined sugar for health reasons - then perhaps, I might regain some of my standing with the Astronomers.

Now, off to Wikepedia to find out about those globular clusters...

On Top of the World

'I've looked at clouds now from both sides...'






The students from the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, are on their astronomy field-trip in Tenerife and I'm in the lucky position of observing them observing.

We travelled in convoy up the mountain, driving from the warmth of the beach in Bajarmar, Tenerife, up through the clouds, to the observatory at Izana.

The Astronomers - Dr Andrea Dieball

Dr. Andrea Dieball, a supervisor on the School of Physics and Astronomy's Tenerife field trip is a Post Doc Researcher in Astronomy.

Andrea specializes in star clusters...these are star systems which are bound together by gravitational forces. She uses light from far Ultra Violet to Infra Red wavelengths to observe stars in globular clusters.

Globular clusters are the most dense and the oldest star systems that we find in the Milky Way. (Older than 10 billion years) - apparently the universe is about 14 billion years old! There are other types of clusters - for example open clusters which are less dense and younger. (As young as a few million years, but they can be as old as a few billion years - although older open clusters are rare). The Orion nebula is a star forming region with a young open cluster inside - called the Trapezium cluster.

Andrea did her German Diploma (like a Masters degree) and her PhD thesis on Star Clusters in the Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Clouds are two of our closest neighbouring galaxies - these ´Clouds´ are orbiting the Milky Way, and this has an influence on the gas found within the galaxies. Whenever they are close either to each other or the Milky Way the gas is disturbed and over time forms stars (less than a few hundred million years).

There is a theory that all stars are formed in star clusters, then the cluster disolves over time and the stars disperse, forming the field star population in the galaxy - these stars are not bound to each other by gravitational forces. Studying Star clusters is important because they trace the history of galaxies.

Andrea supervised the X-Ray Binary Group during the Design in Gamma Ray astromony course. One of Andrea's students said of her, 'she's excellent, terribly helpful and such a lovely person as well!

Andrea also acts informally as the field-trip nurse, looking after student and staff ailments alike.

The Astronomers - Dr Adam Hill

Dr Adam Hill is a supervisor on the 'Design in Gamma-Ray Astronomy' course at the University of Tenerife, La Laguna which I have been invited to observe.

Adam completed a PhD on ´Surveying the Gamma-ray sky INTEGRAL' in 2006 at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton, and is now a research fellow. He is continuing his work on the INTEGRAL survey specifically focussing on high mass X-ray binaries and the timing/variability properties of the survey sources. Adam is looking at X-Ray 'flashes' from neutron stars and using the information to gain a better understanding of the star systems that they are located in.
http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Fox8-2007.htm

A neutron star is formed from the collapsed remnant of a massive star. It's thought that they are comprised mostly from neutrons - which are particles found in the neucleus of atoms. Neutron stars are small - approximately 20km in diameter and very dense. A tea-spoon full of a neutron star -on earth- would weigh a million tonnes. (Gosh!)

The Astronomers - Simone Scaringi

Dr Adam Hill and Simon Scaringi

Simone Scaringi is a post graduate student at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton. He did his UG work in Maths and Astronomy, then an MPhil on Astronomical data mining with neural networks on Quasars observed from the Sloan and Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). (A Quasar is an extremely bright and distant active galactic nucleus, - a compact halo of material surrounding the central supermassive black hole of a young galaxy. A survey maps the sky using telescopes.)

Simone now writes decision-making algorithms in order to mine INTEGRAL data for the production of future survey catalogues (a list of all gamma-ray objects seen by INTEGRAL). (Simone works with the MATRIX!). His algorithms are created from data taken from INTEGRAL from the beginning of the mission in 2002 and will be applied to the next data set gathered for the production of a new catalogue. This algorithm gets 'trained' in a similar fashion to a simplified artificial brain (neural network) to recognise real INTEGRAL sources. Because of the dynamic gamma-ray sky he is also interested in transient detection techniques.

Once his algorithm has figured out whether data from INTEGRAL real - or caused by noise - the data can then be used to classify the nature of the source. For example; AGN, X-Ray binaries, Supernova remnants, magnetic cataclysmic variables - when a star orbits a white dwarf and emits multi-wavelength radiation and even gamma-ray bursts!

Every 18 months the amount of astronomical data gathered doubles and there is increasing interest in new techniques to reduce the amount of time taken to analyse all this data. Simone's hoping to apply his algorithms to other wavelengths - and even to multi-wavelength analysis to help astronomers unlock all the information that they are gathering.

Simone is supervising a group of students on the Design in Gamma Ray Astronomy course run by the School of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Tenerife, La Laguna. His group say of him ,

The Astronomers - Dr Lorraine Hanlon

Professor Tony Dean (University of Southampton) and Dr. Lorraine Hanlon of University College Dublin.

Dr Lorraine Hanlon is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at University College Dublin. Lorraine's research activities are in the areas of space science and astrophysics, with a particular emphasis on ground-based and space-based studies of gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful and distant sources in the universe.

Lorraine is part of the research group involved in the next-generation space-borne gamma-ray telescope, INTEGRAL, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2002. The group is developing a prototype of the optical camera which will be flown aboard INTEGRAL and is also involved in developing the software for the Integral Science Data Centre (ISDC) which will be used by the scientific community to analyse the data from that instrument. The group is also involved in the study of Blue Compact Dwarf galaxies, Active Galactic Nuclei, Cosmic gamma-ray bursts.

Lorraine is planning to bring her students from Dublin, to Tenerife next year to join those from the University of Southampton and the University of Tenerife, La Laguna. I asked her why she thought it would benefit her students. "It's important because it gets them out of the lab and gives them a real-world environment to work in - they learn to cope with dead-lines and working cross-culturally to get the science delivered". Lorraine also thought that the students were learning very useful transferable skills, important for any future career; presentations skills, working to deadlines, problem-solving and team work.

The gamma-ray students said about her -
"She's amazing - she is, she's been so helpful".

The Astronomers - Prof Ismael Perez-Fournon

Professor Ismael Perez-Fournon the Design in Gamma-Ray Astronomy´ course leader at the University of Tenerife, La Laguna, and member of staff at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.

Ismael's research focuses on : -

Es difícil encontrar una línea de investigación en Astrofísica que haya experimentado un avance más intenso en los últimos años que el estudio de galaxias a alto corrimiento al rojo. La última década del siglo XX ha sido testigo de desarrollos tecnológicos impresionantes en Astronomía tanto desde tierra como en el espacio. Las observaciones que estos progresos han hecho posibles, tales como las observaciones de los Hubble Deep Fields con el Telescopio Espacial Hubble y los estudios de seguimiento con los grandes telescopios en tierra (Keck, VLT, VLA, etc.) y en el espacio (como el ISO) son responsables del avance en este campo.

La búsqueda de corrimientos al rojo cada vez más altos ha sido el motor de un número de proyectos que han cambiado gradualmente nuestra visión del Universo. El primer espectro de una fuente extragaláctica obtenido por Slipher en 1912 fue el de M31. La velocidad heliocéntrica de M31 era aproximadamente -300 km/s. El récord de velocidad medido por Slipher fue +1.800 km/s para la galaxia NGC 584. En los años siguientes Humason determinó corrimientos al rojo para una muestra grande de galaxias con el mejor telescopio disponible, el Hale, de 200 pulgadas. Humason se jubiló en 1957, habiendo medido velocidades de recesión de 60.000 km/s en galaxias del cúmulo de Hidra.

Creyó que no se podía llegar más lejos con los telescopios y detectores de la época. En los años 50 y 60 se descubrió que las galaxias que eran las contrapartidas visibles de radiofuentes extragalácticas poseían corrimientos al rojo mucho mayores. El corrimiento al rojo de la radiogalaxia Cygnus A era sólo de 0,06 (medido por Baade y Minkowski en 1954) pero pronto se identificaron fuentes de radio con corrimientos al rojo mucho mayores. El corrimiento al rojo más alto medido por Minkowski fue de 0,46 para la radiofuente 3C 295. Más tarde se descubrieron los cuásares en un programa de identificación de radio fuentes. Maarten Schmidt demostró en 1963 que el corrimiento al rojo de 3C 273 era de 0,158. En las décadas siguientes los proyectos de seguimiento de estudios en radio y en el visible de cuásares y radiogalaxias compitieron entre ellos para encontrar corrimientos al rojo cada vez mayores.

Beautiful Tenerife

The photos - taken on a University of Southampton's School of Physics and Astronomy's 'Design in Gamma-Ray Astronomy Course, in Tenerife - are taken from the Defin Hotel, Bajamar, the University of Tenerife, La Laguna and from the car - en-route to the University.

Spain versus Southampton

After having worked from 9am-7pm for the last 6 days, students needed time to 'kick off' yesterday during their collaborative UK and Tenerife, Design in Astronomy Course organised jointly by the University of Southampton and the University of Tenerife, La Laguna.

Uncharacteristically, the UK won against Spain!