Stuart Lowe's blog

Styling Observations

Our public archive showcases all observations made by schools, amateur astronomical societies, and related groups that use the two 2-meter Faulkes Telescopes. Yesterday we had a minor relaunch of the public observations archive. This update adds some summary information to the user pages, adapts the pages to smaller screens, and adds a new experimental view by astronomical object.

The Veil Unveiled

Last week I was hunting through our archive of public observations. I wanted to find observations that, together, would form a larger image. My plan was to test out some command-line software - Montage - that can automatically combine FITS files into mosaics.

Animated Asteroids from FTN

On Thursday, January 26 2012 a group of Faulkes Telescope Project users combined forces to observe an asteroid.

Searching

Following the updates to our website last month one area that still needed improving was our website search. For a while we've been relying on the built-in search that comes with our main content management software. That's started to prove very limited as we build more and more tools that sit outside of it. With the new website live, there was a chance to improve that situation. We now make use of a Google Search Appliance which gives better results and can search more of our growing website.

Observations Upgraded

A while back I wrote about our efforts to ensure that every observation taken by a public user of our telescope network has a permanent web presence. As well as providing a page for each observation with relevant information, it allowed people to browse through the tens of thousands of observations by user and by telescope. Today, along with the update to our main site, we're providing some extra ways to browse and search the public observations.

Show Me Stars!

Back in January, comedian Dara Ó Briain co-presented a UK TV show named Stargazing Live that was shown at prime time on the main BBC TV channel. Several million people tuned in for three nights to watch live updates from telescopes around the world.

Virtual Sky

FITS for the web

If you've ever used a telescope with a CCD camera you've probably encountered FITS files. FITS, or Flexible Image Transport System, is a file format used widely in astronomy to share images.

How would you like your observations?

Observation Slideshows

Over recent months we've been improving how we show observer's images. We started by building an ontology based around /observations. Every observation (e.g. this observation of spiral galaxy M65), observer (e.g. Whitchurch High School) and telescope (e.g.

Linking Data

Looking for something?

Search is one of the most popular activities on the internet^* and the observation search on the LCOGT website is one of its most popular sections. We've just improved the search tool to make it easier to find your own observations and to browse through the observations of others. As it is now live I thought I'd describe some of the changes and improvements here.

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