AAT Outreach Exercise: “LMC Little Gems with CACTI”

Today, Thursday 24th November I’m the scheduled support astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). It is a “2dF+AAOmega service night”, meaning that I’ll be observing “service programs”, that is, science projects that require less than 6 hours in total to be completed, using the 2dF+AAOmega instruments at the 3.9m AAT.

Additionally, I’ve requested additional ~30 minutes to try to use the new CACTI camera to get a new, nice outreach image of an interesting object. As I did last May I’m asking the public to please provide feedback and help us to decide.

What do you want the AAT observes tonight?

For today’s observations I have chosen 4 objects located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC),  that is why I’ve called the experiment “LMC Little Gems using CACTI”.

The chosen 4 objects are these:

1. Stellar cluster + Nebula NGC 1949
2. Globular cluster NGC 2121
3. Supernova remnant NGC 2018
4. Stellar cluster + Nebula NGC 1850

Objects chosen for the “LMC Little Gems with CACTI” Outreach Exercise at the AAT. From top left to bottom right they are: 1. Stellar cluster + Nebula NGC 1949, 2. Globular cluster NGC 2121, 3. SN remnant NGC 2018, 4. Stellar cluster + Nebula NGC 1850. Credit of the images: Digital Sky Survey, except for the image of NGC 1850, credited to ESO (image obtained using the FORS1 instrument at the VLT).

I chose objects in the LMC because this region of the sky can be observed during all night this time of the year.

In addition, getting these data for outreach purposes will not interfere too much with the scientific observations, as we need to change the configuration of the instrument (the gratings of the AAOmega spectrograph) and, while the night assistant is doing that, I will be taking the data of the object chosen by the public for this outreach exercise.

So, what do you think? What do you want the AAT observes tonight?

Please use your Twitter account and cast your vote following this link.

Assuming the weather is good and we don’t have any technical problems, I should have a new, nice outreach image obtained with CACTI at the AAT by tomorrow, Friday 25th November. Stay tuned!

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