NRES is LCO's set of high-resolution echelle spectrographs. The first NRES unit was installed at our Chilean site in March, and it has been undergoing development and testing ever since. Earlier this week, members of the NRES project team met to review the instrument's readiness for routine science operations. The result of that discussion is that we have decided to delay the release of NRES from our original target date, August 1. We expect the delay to be on the order of weeks, not months.
PIs who are waiting to use NRES can expect to receive a notification no less than a week before the instrument will become available.
Las Cumbres Observatory is pleased to announce that we are accepting applications for new education partners with projects to run between 1 December 2017 - 1 December 2018.
Three of LCO's
0.4m telescopes, which hitherto had made observations exclusively of satellites and space debris, are now making science observations. So, if you are an investigator on a project that was granted 0.4m-time, the scheduler may assign your observation requests to one of these "new" telescopes. The locations, camera codes, and dates of first observations for these telescopes are as follows:
- Siding Spring (Australia); camera = kb97; start date = 2017-06-16.
- Teide (Tenerife); camera = kb88; start date = 2017-06-20.
- Haleakala (Maui); camera = kb82; start date = 2017-06-20.
BANZAI-processing of images from these telescopes has begun, and data are available in the archive.
LCO's new observing
portal is now available! Thanks for your patience while we brought the portal online. We think that you'll like it.
Using robotic telescopes for astronomy education is something that is at the heart of my professional interests and I have been actively working on this during my nine years at LCO. This week, my collaborator Dr Michael Fitzgerald and I published a review paper on the subject in the journal, The Astronomical Review.
