A group of Galway school children will see Jupiter and the Crab Nebula up close when they take control of the giant Hawaii-based Faulkes telescope, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
Most kids get only the view from toy telescopes when looking for a close-up of the moon or Jupiter. Tomorrow, a lucky group of Galway students will be playing with a "toy" of a different kind - a giant 2-metre reflecting telescope based in Hawaii.
The 15 to 20 secondary school students from five local schools will get access to a telescope already available to their counterparts in Britain and Northern Ireland via the UK National Schools Observatory. The observatory connects the classrooms to the cosmos using the two giant Faulkes telescopes, one on Mount Haleakala in Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, the other soon to come on line at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
The observatory's Northern Ireland co-ordinator, Robert Hill of Armagh Observatory, and Prof Mike Redfern of NUI Galway's physics department, hope that tomorrow's event might open up access to the observatory's facilities for schools across the Republic.
"It has been going in Britain and Northern Ireland for a while, but the co-ordinators in Northern Ireland are very keen we expand the project into the Republic," says Prof Redfern. "Everyone who has been involved with the telescope has been delighted."
The two instruments are named after Martin "Dill" Faulkes, the generous benefactor who invested about €15 million in the project as a way to get students interested in the sciences. He did a PhD in cosmology at Queen Elizabeth College, London then went on to make a fortune in computers.
"He made a huge amount of money and he decided he wanted to put something back," says Prof Redfern. "It is specifically for schools," he adds, although professional observers can buy time on the telescopes for about €600 an hour.
The Faulkes telescopes are fully automated and are controlled remotely by the user, says Prof Redfern. "Usually the students have the telescope for half-hour sessions and they get to design the observations, set it up and take the data."
The telescopes' locations on the opposite side of the Earth were chosen so that night-time observations could be made during normal school hours on this part of the globe.
Now students in the Republic will have a chance to observe anything they want tomorrow during a two-hour session on the Faulkes "north" instrument in Maui. "We are getting five school teachers and three to four students from each school," says Prof Redfern.
They will assemble tomorrow at NUI Galway and take command of the fully robotic telescope at 10 a.m., with the help of Prof Redfern and Hill. They are free to make any observations they wish, with likely targets being Jupiter and the Crab Nebula, two easy-to-find yet spectacular objects.
This observation run is being undertaken to see if the project's promoters can get a pilot schools' observatory project up and running for the next academic year involving up to 20 schools south of the Border, says Prof Redfern.
Commercial sponsorship is an issue, given it costs about €1,000 per school for the year, but Prof Redfern already has a substantial contribution for the planned pilot scheme, covering about half the cost. The hunt is now on for the remaining money needed to allow a larger school population to control the telescopes and make observations.
"They encourage people to have projects involving a number of schools," he says. "The hope would be that in the following year we would look for more permanent funding," Prof Redfern adds. "I am really hopeful that this will work out and will get students enthusiastic about science."
For more information on the Faulkes telescopes, see www.faulkes-telescope.com