A FINE collaboration

Four countries observing four variable stars in Gemini

If you look high up in the southern part of the night sky in the constellation of Gemini, there are stars that you can see, mainly the bright pair Castor and Pollux, and others that are too dim to see with the naked eye. Several of these stars vary in brightness for a range of reasons.

We have joined an international collaboration along with schools in France, Ireland and Norway to use large remotely-controlled telescopes across the world to analyse four variable stars. From the images that we obtain, we are analysing variations in brightness and plotting on graphs to study how this variation occurs.

The amazing telescopes that we have access to are kindly funded by the Faulkes Telescope project.

The Faulkes Telescope Project team have published a short article about the work we are doing on their website. You can read more about what we are beginning to do here:

http://www.faulkes-telescope.com/2021/03/international-collaboration-four-countries-observing-four-variable-stars-in-gemini/

It is them that dubbed it the FINE Collaboration (France, Ireland, Norway, England).

At present Cieran Whybrow in Y7 has been learning to program the telescopes and will be setting up some of the later observations. We are looking for more students from any year group to get involved in collecting the images and analysing the data.

There is lots still to do. All are welcome and we especially need people with good IT skills and the ability to analyse data. There are some good maths and science links.

As there are currently no after school clubs in person, if you are interested, you may join the Google Classroom using the code: ic6y6we or this link ( https://classroom.google.com/c/Mjk2Mjk1NjAyNzEx?cjc=ic6y6we ).

Alternatively, you could email Dr. Stevens at c.stevens@towers.school

There is also information on our website here: https://sites.google.com/a/towers.school/stevens-science/astronomy-club