Calls for Proposals have gone out from the PATT, LJMU and CAT TACs for observations commencing in Semester 2018A (1 Jan 2018 → 31 Aug 2018 inclusive). The deadline for submission of proposals is 17:00 GMT on Tuesday, 3rd October 2017. Applicants must use the new version (v0.7) of the application form and the new method of submission. Full details of these and the calls for proposals from all three TACs can be found at [this link to the full story].

The Optical Infrared Co-ordination Network for Astronomy (OPTICON) has issued its call for proposals for semester 2018A, for telescopes supported by its Trans-National Access (TNA) programme. The Liverpool Telescope is part of this network, and we have made available fifty hours of telescope time to be used in our semester 2018A, which runs from 1st January 2018 to 31st August 2018 inclusive. The deadline for proposal submissions is 23:59 UT on 31st August 2017. [full story]

Last month the National Schools' Observatory and the Liverpool Telescope held an exhibition in the "Space Hangar" at the 2017 Royal Air Force Cosford Air Show. A news article about this event is now on the Liverpool John Moores University news site. The LT exhibit featured scale models of the Liverpool Telescope, plus its proposed 4 metre diameter successor Liverpool Telescope 2. [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.

Earlier this month, a deputation of Liverpool Telescope (LT) staff visited the National Astromical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT) in the city of Chiang Mai. The purpose of the visit was to begin a programme of collaborative software development to replace the existing telescope control systems on LT and NARIT facilities. This product will also be a key component in the new software which will be required for the Large Robotic Telescope (Liverpool Telescope 2). [full story]

Robert Smith's "Iridis" image of the Cat's Eye Nebula (featured in full here) has inspired an article on the Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) main website about the more general concept of science as art, and art as science. The image won the Robotic Scope Special Prize at the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016. [full story]

The LT's SPectrograph for the Rapid Acquisition of Transients (SPRAT) recently got flux calibration added to its Level 2 pipeline. This will prove to be very useful for LT users performing the transient classification work that SPRAT is regularly used for. [full story]

The Liverpool Telescope has helped to find seven Earth-sized worlds. The discovery of a system of seven Earth-sized planets just 40 light-years away was made possible by a team of astronomers from across the world. The research, published in Nature this week, was led by the STAR Institute at the University of Liège, and used the orbiting NASA Spitzer Space Telescope in addition to ground-based facilities including the Liverpool Telescope. [full story]

In a great illustration of the power of LT's long term monitoring capabilities, the Gravitational LENses and DArk MAtter (GLENDAMA) team has been conducting optical monitoring of about ten gravitationally lensed quasars with the LT since 2005. The light curves of double quasar SDSS J1339+1310 have recently been published (Goicoechea and Shalyapin, 2016) and show a time delay of 47 days between the source images, and interestingly also reveal different microlensing along the two light paths. [full story]