1 July 2022
The final session of the GCSE Astronomy course for this academic year took place this week. Students from Abingdon, Fitzharrys and John Mason schools have been working together on this course throughout the year and several of them intend to take the GCSE exams next summer. The final few sessions have been devoted to completing one of the compulsory observing tasks by using the National Schools Observatory’s Liverpool Telescope to make images of deep sky objects in the Messier Catalogue. The Liverpool Telescope is situated in the Canary Islands and the students learnt to use the online portal to request images of their selected objects then set up appropriate telescope parameters such as filter type and exposure time. A selection of their successful images are shown here and all of these contributed to successful completion of the task.