ATEO Feeling at Home at SkyPi

After a 3 day long excursion across the country, the staff of Insight Observatory has delivered its Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO) to its new home in Pie Town, New Mexico. The 16" f/3.75 Dream Aerospace Systems astrograph has been successfully installed in SkyPi Online Observatory's pod known as Gamma. When we arrived were greeted by SkyPi's Managing Member, John Evelan. We received a tour of the grounds and were introduced to the other imaging telescopes hosted by SkyPi.

John of SkyPi and Muir of Insight Observatory installing the 16" Primary Mirror.

Because of our week-long stay at SkyPi for the telescope installation, we were able to experience the dark and crystal-clear skies that this corner of New Mexico has to offer. We were also fortunate to be able to look thru a 20" Dobsonian telescope at the spring and summer objects that frankly took our breath away... The consensus was that these were some of the best views of objects like the Lagoon Nebula, the Veil Nebula, and others that we had never seen before such as the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. Our deepest thanks to our host, Michael, a staff member of SkyPi, who was generous enough to share his telescope and time with us!

We planned for a full week at the remote observatory site which allowed us to take our time unloading, installing, and configuring the telescope. As we tested the components of the setup, we realized there were improvements that could be made to the focuser. Fortunately, SkyPi has resources in the surrounding area such as a talented machinist who was able to modify the focuser so it would perform with better precision. We were also able to configure all of the networking parameters to allow the public to access the telescope.

Michael of SkyPi Preparing the 16" Mirror for Installation.

This is an important milestone for the ATEO, but our work is not done yet; testing and configuration of the scope needs to be performed and completed, completion of the first iteration of our software has to be released, and other sundries that although minor is still important for success. All in all, we are excited and relieved to finally have the ATEO equipment delivered and installed at SkyPi, and now the real work begins!

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Imaging the April Fools Comet

As we have spent most of our time the past few months planning for the big road trip to New Mexico to install the Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO), I thought it would be nice to do a little remote imaging during one of our weekly ATEO planning conference calls. With all of the comets that have been observable lately, why not quickly capture an image of one remotely from one of iTelescope's remote robotic telescopes, hosted at New Mexico Skies. This remote telescope hosting facility is not too far from where Insight Observatory's ATEO telescope will be hosted just over a month from now at SkyPi Online Observatories.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák pictured with the star Beta Draconis (lower right).
 Image by Insight Observatory.

On the morning of Thursday, April 20, 2017, at 5:05 am EDT, I logged into iTelescope's T14 which is Takahashi FSQ Fluorite with a Petzval Apochromat Astrograph optical design for taking wide-field images. The CCD camera used to image the comet was an SBIG STL-11000M. The image is a simple combined 2 luminances at 5 minutes a piece. The comet's location was just north of the star Beta Draconis in the constellation Draco. If you zoom into the image, you will notice there are two comet nuclei. This demonstrates how much the comet moved between both five-minute images.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, a comet whose identity took nearly 100 years to pin down, made its closest approach to Earth on Saturday, April 1st, just in time for April Fools' Day, but it was not a cosmic prank. It was the comet's closest Earth encounter in more than 50 years, and maybe more than a century stated NASA officials.

The comet was first discovered in 1858 by Horace Parnell Tuttle of the Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was then re-discovered by Michel Giacobini in 1907 and Ľubor Kresák in 1951. The comet had two close encounters with Jupiter that altered its orbit slightly. A member of the Jupiter family of comets, 41P makes a trip around the sun every 5.4 years, coming relatively close to Earth on some of those trips. On this approach, the comet will pass our planet at a distance of about 13 million miles (0.14 astronomical units), or about 55 times the distance from Earth to the moon.

As the comet passed closest to Earth (0.14 a.u.) from mid-March through early April, it continued to hurry across the circumpolar constellations Ursa Major and Draco. Created with Chris Marriott's SkyMap

"Comet hunters in the Northern Hemisphere should look for it near the constellations Draco and Ursa Major, which the Big Dipper is part of," NASA officials said in a statement. "Whether a comet will put on a good show for observers is notoriously difficult to predict, but 41P has a history of outbursts, and put on quite a display in 1973. If the comet experiences similar outbursts this time, there's a chance it could become bright enough to see with the naked eye. The comet was expected to reach perihelion, or its closest approach to the sun, on April 12." The comet should stay visible through the month of July this year.

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LHS 1140b - A Super-Earth in the Habitable Zone

We're getting our first good characterizations of terrestrial exoplanets lately. First, news broke of a possible planet around the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri. Then, we explored TRAPPIST-1, a mini solar system just 39 light-years away. Now, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced the discovery today of a possible super-Earth orbiting an M-dwarf star just 34 light-years away. The discovery was published in the April 20th Nature.

An artist’s impression of exoplanet LHS 1140 orbiting a red dwarf star 41 light-years distant. ESO/SpaceEngine.org.

LHS 1140b is a tantalizing find. It is a cool, red host, LHS 1140, contains only 15% of the mass of our Sun and is at least 5 billion years old. The planet passes in front of its star once every 15 days as seen from Earth. Jason Dittman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and the team combined discovery data from the MEarth project with radial-velocity measurements from the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) survey.

The high-resolution follow-up observations enabled researchers to calculate the planet's orbital parameters and physical characteristics to a high degree of precision: The super-Earth, containing between 4.8 and 8.5 times Earth's mass, orbits just 0.09 astronomical units from its primary (almost a quarter of the average distance between the Sun and Mercury). The planet spans around 1.4 Earths. Combine its mass and radius and you'll calculate an incredibly dense 12.5 g/cm3 — the planet has more than twice Earth's average density!

Though red dwarfs are often tempestuous flare stars — a strike against life on any orbiting worlds — they're also long-lived and miserly in terms of energy output. These cool stars are expected to shine for trillions of years, longer than the present age of the Universe. That's a plus in that it gives ample time to get the engine of evolution going.

Read Full Source Article at http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/welcome-lhs-1140b-super-earth-habitable-zone/

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