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Schoolchildren and Students Visiting ING

Preparing for observing


Observing with the 1.0-m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope

At ING we are running a pilot project at the 1.0-m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT). In coordination with experiensed teachers and the assistance of a support astronomer students can use this telescope on a discretionary night. Arrangements must be made well in advance (2 months or more) and you must be aware that observations are planned on a risky basis. The number of observers is limited to 2 or 3. If you think your group can apply for such a night on the JKT please contact Javier Méndez. We encourage schools to organise astronomy competitions to select the students who will fly to La Palma. Alternatively we are happy to receive groups of teachers involved in astronomy teaching.

The information below will help you to organise an observing night on the JKT:

Preparing Observations

The students can carry out their own observing programme or participate in one of our current projects, in particular, the first professional collection of Messier objects (find out more about the Messier objects here).

The Telescope and the CCD Camera.

Preparing the observing programme.

  1. We assume that the students are introduced to observing astronomy by their teachers before they leave for La Palma or that students have been selected by an astronomy competition, so some kind of astronomy background is expected.
  2. Select the objects according to visibility on the observing date from La Palma, field of view (JKT's field of view=11 arcminutes), magnitude and available filters at the JKT.
  3. If you want to join our programme to complete the first professional collection of Messier objects please pick up objects from this web page. We aim at producing colourful images by combining red, green and blue images so for this programme you will have to observe with filters R, V and B.
  4. Once objects are selected you must calculate exposure times for each filter, prepare a finding chart and produce the observing plot.
  5. Find out more about the objects you will observe by making a search on the web using Google.

Observing

The day before the observations the students stay at the observatory's residence together with the rest of the astronomers. At arrival they are shown round the observatory, the William Herschel Telescope, the Isaac Newton Telescope and the Caldera de Taburiente National Park. They go to bed late preparing the last details of their observing programme with the supervision of the support astronomer.

On the observing day the students wake up late and in the afternoon they visit the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope. Then they participate in the set-up of the JKT in the evening and after dinner they start the observations. The students can go to bed at any time as the support astronomer can finish observing for them. During observations the students and the support astronomer talk about the physical aspects of the observed objects and they are shown a quick reduction of the data.

On the following day the students are quickly introduced to image reduction and they leave the observatory for sea-level with the raw data in the evening. They are invited to visit our sea-level base in Santa Cruz de La Palma if they are staying longer on La Palma.

The images are then reduced by the support astronomer and passed onto amateur astronomer Nik Szymanek. Nik is an expert in producing astonishing astronomical pictures from CCD images.

After observing

After observations students are invited to prepare a report which is then posted on these web pages together with pictures of the visit and the data reduced by the support astronomer. The students' names are kept as authors of the images. We also encourage the students to make a presentation in their school or elsewhere.


Javier Méndez
jma@ing.iac.es