It is fairly common to hear about schools with observatories that are sitting on campus unused and gathering cobwebs and rust. The general theme of the story is less a hero’s journey and more a hero’s departure. The observatory initially gets placed on campus through much expenditure of donated or school funds over more time than most people expected but primarily driven by the motivation of a single staff member at the school, usually a teacher. Much like life, nothing lasts forever and a teacher’s tenure at a given school lasts a significantly great deal less than forever. Generally the end of the story is “Teacher X went onto another school/retired and then nobody used the observatory anymore” — the hero’s departure. If you are one of those schools, we want to hear from YOU! Rehabilitating school observatories is central to our goals.

But lets think more about what happened during the journey of the observatory to the eventual departure. To run a school observatory requires quite a significant amount of effort over time. Things to consider include:

• How are the students going to access and use the telescope?
• If students are using it remotely, who is going to monitor and organise that usage?
• How do our students look at objects in the opposite hemisphere? Or during the daytime in class?
• Is it possible to rehabilitate our current observatory? Or do you build a new one?
• How do students access and analyse the data?

If the use of the telescope is only on-campus, at night-time, then this – generally – means the observatory may only be used a few nights a year. It usually implies teacher overtime (and usually a single specific teacher again and again) and a lot of safety considerations and forms. The solution to this is to provide direct access to the telescope somehow to the students. Again, who is organising and monitoring this usage? That same teacher probably. No matter how passionate the teacher, at some point that teacher is going to have to mark and do lesson plans and be at parent-teacher evenings and – rare though it may be – take some personal time off. The distribution of teacher workload versus student usage is also quite inconvenient. Precisely when students might like or need to use the telescope – during school term – largely overlaps when the teacher is at their busiest. Conversely during the holidays the students and teachers are equally nowhere to be seen.

With proper management, the school observatory can be open and collecting photons every clear night for all users. But that proper management cannot happen within the workload of a single person at the school usually. That is where the NextAstro system comes in. We monitor and control your telescope through our software and take care of it centrally. Our automated systems can open and close your observatory and allow direct and indirect control of the telescope without danger to any part of the observatory itself. We will also manually – as in a human looks at it and decides – monitor the likelihood of danger, storms or rain at your observatory that evening and set it to absolute shutdown if necessary. We can also monitor and remotely bugfix problems at the observatory – at least those that are not necessary to be physically present. Engaging us to undertake this for your school allows your teachers to be free to do what they originally wanted the observatory to do — inspire, engage and educate your students!

There are a few different aspects to consider about the sky at your observatory that may lead you to similar conclusions as we have gotten to! The most obvious is the weather. The sky can be blanketed with clouds – sometimes dropping water (hopefully on the observatory roof!). Thats the obvious one. This means that if your student wants to get an image that evening, it is not possible. With direct use, that means the student has missed out on their opportunity to get their image. If this use is part of a class, then getting their data is delayed which means activities in the classroom get delayed and teachers (and students) have a harder time in the classroom trying to keep synchronized together in the limitations of the timeframe on which the curriculum material is being provided. There are solutions to this.

Instead of the student directly using the telescope, with our system, they can schedule their observation in a queue to be observed. The telescope will then automatically attempt to observe their object when the roof is open and the sky is clear and dark. Students can still directly use the telescope and can still schedule an observation at a specific time (this is useful for some types of observation) but for students who don’t mind when their image is taken, this facilitates them getting their data easily. This is especially true for observations at 3am in the morning!

But, in reality, many schools are in coastal cities that can be clouded out for a week or in tropical areas where it can be raining for longer! If you have the privilege of being in a dark, dry, high, remote or rural school this may not be as much of a problem…. But if the school observatory is connected to the NextWork, a collaboration of school, university and private observatories, the students’ request can, if you allow it, be shared out to another observatory that can get the data for them and likewise your observatory can help out other teachers when they need to get data. This collaboration facilitates fast and rapid data collection for students. If you can imagine you might have 100 students who are doing astronomy for 3 weeks in a given grade and they may all need observations in a single week. Thats a lot for your single observatory! But it is not a lot for a Ne(x)tWork of telescopes.

The other consideration is… your observatory can’t see the other northern/southern hemisphere. Australia cannot see the closest galaxy, Andromeda, and never can (not quite true but true enough, it is very low in the sky). This is usually something students are disappointed in. Also, students can only use the telescope directly at nighttime whereas classes (usually) are in the daytime. With the NextWork, you can access telescopes in the opposite hemisphere (at this point largely between Australia and the United States) to see, request and observe objects in the other hemisphere. It is also possible to use telescopes in the United States in the afternoon in Australia and use telescopes in Australia in the morning in the United States. As more scopes get added in the West of Australia and the East of the USA (contact us if this is you!) and in other countries around the globe, this timeframe expands.

While we do rehabilitate older existing equipment, we can also refurbish the equipment as well as consult on the construction of new observatories or expansions. Before relegating your current observatory to the school skip bin, contact us first! Some pieces of equipment age terribly. This is particularly true of cameras just because technology is rapidly developing there but an older optical tube and mirrors can be perfectly fine and as long as the mount points and tracks adequately this can be perfectly serviceable. So please contact us for consulting to make your investment in a new observatory a strategic one!

As we use custom observatory code that we are the main developers on, we can also usually creatively work around seemingly not working or underperforming older equipment. Within reason, this can be provided free as part of the management contract. There are many pieces of equipment we will politely not name here that have been very difficult to automate in the past that we have liberated with our software. It may be the case that your observatory might be fine aside from one or two pieces of equipment where you should target your expenditure to achieve your goals. As we don’t actually sell the equipment, we have no vested interest in guiding you down the garden path.

Now that you have an observatory, it can be pointed at the sky and students can request images from it (and potentially others) then what? How do the students get their data? Here is the other problem a typical school observatory (and realistically most observatories) have – what do you do with the giant pile of data that comes out of the telescope that is now on the computer harddrive? This is another problem NextAstro solves. All images from the scopes are calibrated, cleaned, measured, packaged and made available for students to access either online or on your local network or both. What then? Then that is a topic for another article! But the gist is that we provide curriculum material, self-paced courses for teachers and students, a NextAstro high school astronomy club as well as professional development for teachers. Read more about it on the site or in the article/s here!