At St Mary's University, there is the Burke-Gaffney Observatory. The automated dome harbours a 60-centimetre (24-inch) Corrected Dall-Kirkham telescope with two CCD cameras. It was the first telescope in the world to be accessible via social media.
You can, for free, issue commands to the robotic telescope so that you may image an astronomical target be it a galaxy, supernova, diffuse nebula, open cluster, comet, etc.
Blake Nancarrow delivered a presentation on using BGO on 10 October 2018 at OSC. He offered a handout file with notes to accompany the presentation proper. The talk was live-streamed and video recorded.
- notes format: PDF
- title: Using the BGO at SMU
- size: 105 KB
- file link
See the provided handout for general information on BGO plus a hyperlink to the main observatory web page.
The hyperlinks shown in the presentation are noted here for your reference:
- SMU department of Astronomy and Physics page
- BGO main page with general information
- BGO Getting Started page
- BGO basic Command Reference page
- local weather page
- video tutorial on performing remote colour processing
- Facebook page on BGO and ARO
- information page on FITS Liberator with download link
- Blake's lumpy darkness blog with many images captured by BGO
[video link: coming soon]
Be seeing you. Contact Blake Nancarrow astronomy at computer-ease dot com for errors, omissions, questions.