The Liverpool Telescope contributed to the multiwavelength follow-up campaign of the blazar TXS 0506+056, published last month in Science (IceCube Collaboration, Science, 2018, 361, 1378: arXiv:1807.08816). The campaign was prompted by the detection on 22 September 2017 of a neutrino with an energy of ~290 tera electron volts, by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. The observatory consists of thousands of sensors buried in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, designed to detect the Cherenkov radiation from charged particles. [full story]

The latest call for proposals for telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme has just been released. The LT is one of the telescopes in this programme, and complete instructions on how to apply to OPTICON for time on the LT are given in the full text of the call, which is included in the main news story. The deadline for applications is 23:59UT on Sunday 2nd September.  [full story]

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) recently hosted a 3-week Newton Fund collaboration workshop with the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT). Both LJMU and NARIT own and operate their own 2-m class telescopes, and have developed a common interest in exploiting new technologies for data management and archiving, both for their existing telescopes and the proposed new 4 metre robotic telescope project on which they are collaborating. [full story]

On 18-19 January the Astrophysics Research Institute hosted LJMU's partners and prospective partners in the 4.0m New Robotic Telescope (NRT) project for a two-day workshop in Liverpool. LJMU staff were joined by representatives from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, and by videolink the National Astronomical Observatory of China. The workshop focussed on the new science the telescope will enable and the new technologies needed to build the telescope, and discussed the building and formalising of the funding consortium. [full story]

The interstellar object currently exiting the Solar System has finally been named as ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for "reach out for" (‘Ou) and "very first/in advance of" (mua mua). Thus the name "reflects the way this object is like a scout or messenger sent from the distant past."

The LT was among the first wave of telescopes around the world to observe ‘Oumuamua thanks to quick action by one of its users. Data from all of the telescopes observing this object have revealed many interesting facts about this visitor from another star system. [full story]

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.