M51 from Loiano, Italy

Hi Folks,

Dont even know if ye even remember me, but I'm back and this is my first post in over 2 years on this site. And I thought i'd share something quiet special with ye. As some of ye may know already from my previous posts, I am studying Physics with Astrophysics in NUI Galway at the moment and I had the privilege of going to the Loiano Obsevatory in Italy (before the earthquake I might add) to do some observational work on the 1.5m telescope there. More info on that here: www.bo.astro.it/loiano/

Anyway, my classmates and I were each given different tasks when ye were over there and mine was to take a tri-colour image of M51 and, well, here is the result.

http://http://www.flickr.com/photos/23452830@N05/7497899438/in/photostream

To be perfectly honest I cant remember the details of the image, however I do know I took it in Green Blue and H-alpha. I will try and get the stats asap.

Any questions about the trip or my course are more than welcome. Criticism of my image is not! Only joking! haha

Enjoy,
Clear Skies,
John D

Hi John,

Congratualations! Nice image.

A friend of mine Dr Massimo Teodorani used to work there on Be cool stars. He told me at the time that the primary mirror was cracked when taking it out for re aluminizing it. I understood from him that they had to make a whole new mirror. Presumably all is working now.

What specific area of interest have you in astronomy?

Eamonn

www.kingslandobservatory.com

Oh that's interesting, i never knew that. Yes we were working along with the telescope operator Ivan Bruno up there.

Well my main interest would be without a doubt extra solar planets and exoplanet systems! It has been a huge interest of mine in astronomy for a while now.

Hi John,

I've tried my hand with Mike Foylan and Dave McDonald on the boards here at some exoplanet transits.

Our first one was back in 2007 GL 581, and another was HD 17156b in 2008.
We used two telescopes and CCD cameras. ie. different locations

We successfully recorded the transit GL 581.
We sent the results to Greg Laughlin of Transit.org at ULICK and we also got it published by another journal.

The exoplanet HD 17156b was interesting because the transit started 4 minutes early.
This was surprising. Transit.org feedback was that we may have detected another planet. In fact, I was told that we may have detected a Rossiter Mcloughlin effect indicating a new planet. A paper by others did come out the following month suggesting that this was the case.

So we've had some fun trying our hands at exoplanet monitoring.
Its really enjoyable doing science and getting pleasant surprises out of it.


Eamonn