Mr Davey’s Year 10 GCSE Astronomy class recently had the opportunity to use a professional robotic telescope based in Hawaii. This multi-million-pound resource is provided for schools to use free-of-charge thanks to the Faulkes Telescope Project and the class were able to control the Telescope, in real-time, to collect images for their core practical work.

Some useful information regarding the images:

Messier 97 Owl Nebula
A star slightly smaller than the Sun at the end of its red giant phase threw out its outer layers around 8000 years ago to create this planetary nebula. The central star is a white dwarf, now slowly cooling as it dies.

Messier 63 Spiral Galaxy
This is home to approximately 400 billion stars. It is 30 million light years away, so we are seeing it as it was back when the first apes were evolving on Earth.