The Liverpool Telescope is a 2.0 metre unmanned fully robotic telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos on the Canary island of La Palma. It is owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University, with financial support from STFC.
Working with international partners, LJMU intends to build a 4.0-metre class robotic telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, on the same mountaintop site as the 2.0-metre class Liverpool Telescope. We are seeking experienced personnel to fill two 5-year fixed-term positions of Project Manager and Lead Engineer, salary for both positions being in the range £39,993 – £49,149 per annum. The closing date for applications for both posts is midnight at the end of Friday 3rd November 2017. [more details]
Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) is one of six institutions shortlisted for Research Project of the Year: STEM in this year's Times Higher Awards.
The nomination has been awarded for the use of the SPRAT spectrograph in the study of the unique recurrent nova M31N 2008-12a in the Andromeda Galaxy. SPRAT (SPectrograph for the Rapid Analysis of Transients) was designed and built in late 2014 by the LJMU telescope group. It uses volume phase holographic gratings to maximise efficiency and has proved to be a powerful tool for transient classification with minimal human intervention. [full story]
An album of over seventy spectacular pictures made from LT data has just been added to the LT Picture Gallery. The pictures were made by taking archived greyscale IO:O data that had been observed through effectively red, green and blue filters, and combining them in various ways to produce colour images. This skilful post-processing was performed by Swedish amateur astrophotographers Göran Nilsson and Wim van Berlo. [full story]
[UPDATE (26 July): The filter has now been changed] The RISE fast-readout camera is having its "V+R" filter replaced with a 720 nm long-pass filter on 26th July 2017. This is being done to enhance the capabilities of the camera with regard to measurement of exoplanet transits around late-type, red dwarf stars. More details can be found in the "Filter" section of the RISE instrument page.
Changes to LT data handling procedures now mean that new science data are being distributed to observers between 09:30 and 10:30 UTC on the morning after they were observed, seven days a week. We hope this will further enhance the LT’s effectiveness for time domain astrophysics. See the full news article for discussion of how this will affect your research.
