Go Observing Overview

	The Liverpool Telescope

This is neccessary because using a professional telescope is a complicated process. From choosing suitable objects, through choice of instrument, filter and exposure time to the final submission to the telescope, there are many astronomical and technical difficulties.

Go Observing has been designed to hide all the uninteresting technicalities to just leave the important and interesting decisions. Of course, what is interesting and important will depend on what you are hoping to do (particularly from an educational standpoint) so the system is very flexible, adjusts to the age-group of the user and guides you through the process via a series of questions and simple choices.

The aim of this is to ensure that you and your pupils have a good choice of possible observations without constant disappointment due to poor choices of object, filter, exposure time etc.

Once you have made your choice, Go Observing will then turn it into a form that the telescope can understand, send the request out, monitor what is happening to it and keep you informed.

	"My Observations"

You can keep an eye on the status of your observations using the "My Observations" tool. Here you will be given a list of all the observing programmes that you have requested with a summary of their current status. Simply click on the Code for a particular programme to find out more details.

Note: Each user will see their own list of observations, of course. However, to keep the lists of managable length, observations more than a year old will be removed. You can still get at all your observations through the Archive.

	"Observability" colour bars for some planets

Other factors, such as weather, are not predictable. You can keep an eye on the weather at the Liverpool Telescope using our special Weather Station Archive.

Weather permitting, observations that have "excellent" or "good" chances of being observed (yellow or red on the "observability" bars) will usually be done the night that they are requested. The same is usually true for "reasonable" objects (light blue/green), although some nights the telescope is busier than others, so these may have to wait a night or two.

We keep a close eye on "turn-around time" for observations and sometimes "tweak" the system to make sure it is always running as efficiently as possible. It is also worth noting that the telescope does not know (or care) who requested a particular observation, so your requests have exactly the same chance as those from professional astronomers.

	LTImage displaying the Crab Nebula in false colours

You can then use the LTImage software to display, explore and analyse the data. This software, like Go Observing itself brings the power of professional astronomy tools into the classroom in a much more "user friendly" way. You can find out more about what the software can do by following the LTImage Workshops or simply loading in some data and playing!

In addition to the image data itself, you can also get a lot of additional information when you download your image. These include information about the weather and observing conditions. Not only are these interesting in their own right, but can help you to understand any differences between observations (Was there any thin cloud? How close was the moon? etc).

	Go Observing Archive search form

You can search through the archive in a number of ways, for example by object name, or by the kind of Observing Programme. There is also an "advanced" version of the search form for even more detailed searches.

So, there should be no problem if you are unlucky with the weather and do not have the observations you want for a particular lesson or just want to explore the possiblities quickly and easily.

1. The Go Observing system is not totally open-ended (see below) so there is an automatic limit to the total number of requests for any one night (although this limit is very large).
2. If identical requests are made by more than one user, only a single observation is taken and given to both the users. However, this is never done retrospectively. So, if you request an observation of Jupiter a couple minutes after one was taken, another will be taken just for you.

If you want to know more about the details of this process, please get in touch.

	The Andromeda Galaxy The LT "Field of View" is also shown

For example, many people would like to observe the Andromeda galaxy. However, this is thousands of times the size of the field-of-view of the main camera on the Liverpool Telescope!

So, continuing with galaxies as an example, from a database of more than 20,000, we have selected about 100 that we know will produce good results. From these, Go Observing will select the handful that are best at a particular time for you to choose between. Over time, we will also be changing and enlarging the database so that the choice will always be evolving.

In this way, we make sure that people are not disappointed with their observations, which would be discouraging and counter-productive. However, this will sometimes mean that your favourite object is not observable. If you have a particular preference, or would like to see different objects included, please let us know and we can discuss with you the best way to observe your choices.

	Using LTImage in a computer room

Also, the Teacher usernames and password give access to a wider range of observing programmes than the Student ones. Because of this, you can happily let your pupils work on their own without worrying about them getting lost or overloaded with too many choices.

Remember that you can set up entire class sets of usernames using the Registration Management tool.