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.
An international team of astrophysicists have uncovered an enormous bubble currently being "blown" by the regular eruptions from a binary star system within the Andromeda Galaxy.
As reported in this week's Nature, recent observations with the Liverpool Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope, supported by spectroscopy from the Gran Telescopio Canarias, and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (some of the largest astronomy facilities on Earth) discovered this enormous shell-like nebula surrounding ‘M31N 2008-12a’, a recurrent novae located in our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy. At almost 400 lightyears across and still growing, this shell is far bigger than a typical nova remnant (usually around a lightyear in size) and even larger than most supernova remnants. [full story]
The LT Time Allocation Committee (TAC) has issued its Call for Proposals for PATT and JMU for Semester 2019A, which runs from 1st July 2019 to 29th February 2020 inclusive. The deadline for applications for both PATT and JMU is 23:59 GMT on Monday 8th April 2019.. Total allocation time for priority A & B proposals is 242 hours for PATT and 262 hours for JMU. [full story]
We have recently launched a new website for the Liverpool Telescope 2 or "New Robotic Telescope (NRT)" project. The webpages at www.robotictelescope.org detail the science case, NRT team and latest news items in relation to the new telescope. The NRT team are currently preparing the Phase A design of the new 4-metre fully robotic and autonomous telescope, ready for a design board review in the Spring. The NRT will slew faster than the LT and be on target taking data within 30 seconds of trigger, allowing us to explore more rapidly fading targets. [full story]
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) group will be organising a session at NAM2019, this year’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM), from 30th June – 4th July. Hosted by the Royal Astronomical Society, NAM2019 will be held at Lancaster University. As part of the 4-day conference, two 90 minute sessions will be held to discuss the future science topics for the NRT, along with the instrumentation requirements for the most effective time domain research. [full story]
The Liverpool Telescope recently made mid-infrared images of the Moon during January's lunar eclipse. This was a first for the LT, which normally observes in the optical or near-infrared part of the spectrum. The observations were made as part of an experiment to see what data could be collected with an off-the-shelf uncooled thermal infrared microbolometer array camera sensitive to the 7-14 micron wavelength range. These cameras are much cheaper than their cooled counterparts. Maisie Rashman, co-investigator in this experiment and a PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University's Astrophysics Research Institute, said "Once partial eclipse started we were able to see lots of small very bright, almost point, sources appear." [full story]
