Faulkes Telescope Project!

The Faulkes Telescope project is for a group of schools and researchers who want to get involved to help gather images of the Schwassmann 29P Comet. The comet is breaking up just outside Jupiter at the current time. The researchers involved are gathering images using two telescopes, the north and south telescope. The north telescope is located in Hawaii and the south telescope is in Australia. Each researcher is given half an hour to capture images using a computer based system that you can log on to using the internet.

One of the teams helping out on this project is a group of amateur astronomers at the Norman Lockyer observatory.  Carol Boote is one of the astronomy enthusiasts taking part in this program and she says “we take the images in green, blue and red because when we put them on top of each other the image comes out in colour. We control the telescope using this astrological software so we can find the commit and then photograph it as we wish. Then we send the images to the Faulkes project website and they analyse our findings.” So far, researchers state that the commit is getting weaker and weaker as of February 2010.