"Quicklook" facility released for general use

1900 GMT 11 July 2006

All data taken with the Liverpool Telescope is now available online (password protected) within approximately 15 minutes of the observation.

Note however that the quicklook data do not use the most up to date flat fields, and have not undergone any quality control inspection.

The quicklook data is just that - a "quick look" at the data for preliminary use only. Full reductions using the most recent flat fields, and passed by quality control inspection, are typically available from the data archive and Recent Data resources in the following morning.

For further details, see: quicklook.

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Robotic NEO tracking ability upgraded

1900 GMT 11 July 2006

At users' request we recently changed the way we handle observations of rapidly moving targets to make it easier to observe near-Earth objects (NEOs). An excellent opportunity to test the new software came with the close pass of 2004XP14 last week which was enthusiastically covered by much of the media. On the night of 3rd July, the asteroid was moving at a non-sidereal rate of 2 arcminutes per minute and the robotic scheduler was able to successfully make observations. This bodes well for future NEO observations as most move much more slowly through the sky.