Southern Lights in Siding Spring Observatory
The recent powerful solar storm allowed us to register Aurora Australis even from our southern node, which is located at latitude 31S. Enjoy the video below! Can you spot Magellanic Clouds as well?
GOTO featured in LIGO MAGAZINE
GOTO collaboration members, Kendall Ackley and Ben Godson, put together a nice story about our on-site operations for LIGO magazine. It can be found in the following PDF on page 10: https://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue23.pdf
GOTO launches citizen science project
We have launched a citizen science project allowing members of the public to engage in real-time science! This project allows users to classify new detections by GOTO and help find unusual discoveries, and train the next generation of computer models we use to sift our data. Kilonova Seekers is a unique and innovative citizen science…
Two New Arrays of Telescopes Installed at Siding Spring Observatory
We are excited to announce the installation of two new arrays of telescopes at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, marking a significant milestone in the GOTO project. Within only a month, we also managed to successfully perform all the instrumentation alignments and calibrations, as well as prepare the systems for autonomous operations.
New GOTO domes erected in Siding Spring Observatory
We had some excitement at the end of the year as the platform at our new site in Siding Spring Observatory in Australia had been finally finished and we could build clamshell domes for the GOTO-South node. Warwick/Monash/ANU team did a great effort to make it happen over the course of the last 4 days.…
GOTO project on BBC – video reports
We are enclosing videos related to the BBC story from the previous news entry. BBC news story: http://goto-observatory.org/media/movies/Goto%20BBC.mp4 And “Cosmic Hunters” story available through BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0cq8xpx
GOTO project featured on BBC News
Last month we had BBC team visiting northern GOTO node at Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma island and today a special report was released on BBC channel: Neutron stars: New telescope detects dead suns colliding – BBC News
Full northern node deployed!
The second half of November was a very busy time on La Palma for our project. We managed to successfully replace the prototype mount and 4 telescopes with brand new hardware. The final setup consists of 16 fast, wide-field H400 astrographs (40cm/f2.4) shared between two independent equatorial DDM500 mounts installed in the individual clam-shell domes.…
Second GOTO system installed at Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory
This summer our team visited La Palma and along with the manufacturer’s crew they successfully installed new telescope array in the second dome. The setup consists of eight fast 40cm/2.4 H400 astrographs on shared DDM500 mount. Each telescope is fitted with LRGB colour filter wheel and 50 MPix CCD camera with pixel scale of 1.28″.…
The second GOTO system ready for deployment
We are happy to announce that the on-sky factory test of the second GOTO system was successful. These were performed outside ASA headquarters in wintry conditions. All tracking and wind-resistance tests were within expected specs and with excellent tracking performance. An impressive slewing speed of 10 degrees per second was achieved with pointing accuracy better…