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Australian Gemini School Astronomy Contest: 2010 details

Image credit: Gemini Observatory

Entries for the 2010 Australian Gemini School Astronomy Contest are now closed.
Check back soon for the announcement of the winners.
This year, high school students in Australia have a chance to use an hour of observing time on one of the world's largest optical telescopes, the 8-metre Gemini South telescope in the Andes Mountains of Chile.

How? By picking an object in the Southern sky and writing a winning explanation of why it would be interesting to digitally photograph.

See below for more contest details, and keep checking our News page for updates on the contest progress and for the latest exciting discoveries announced by Gemini.

Facebook You can also follow the contest on Facebook.

Teachers: Please help us spread the word to your pupils about this exciting opportunity. Look for our pull-out FLYER in the middle of the March issue of ASTA's Teaching Science journal, and for our advertisement in the March issue of Australian Teacher Magazine.

How to Enter

In one page, explain why your selected target would be a good choice to be imaged by the Gemini South Telescope. Justify your answer with reasons of scientific interest and visual appeal.

Download the entry form here (in Microsoft Word format).
[Alternatively, a hard copy can be printed from this PDF file.]

Submit both pages of the form:

Entries must be received by: Friday 7 May 2010

Entries may be written individually or in groups, but must be submitted by a high school teacher. Limit of two entries per high school. The contest is open to any Australian high school-level students, as well as inter-school groups and clubs of high school students, provided each entry has a clearly designated submitting high school and teacher.

What You May Win

The best-ranked entry will have their object imaged by Gemini. The professionally processed picture will then be presented to the school by astronomers who will explain what the image reveals about the target.

The classes for the top three entries will be eligible to participate in a Live From Gemini program, an introduction to the Gemini telescopes provided via a video link to experts in one of the Gemini control rooms.

Selection of Winner

Judging of the entries will take place by a panel comprised of astronomers, educators, and science journalists. The selection criteria will be to find the entry that best describes both the scientific interest of the target and the visual appeal of the resulting image.

Target Limitations

To be observable during the time frame of June-August, there are restrictions on the allowed position of the object. Like latitude and longitude on the Earth, objects in the sky have coordinates in Right Ascension and Declination (see this page for an explanation). The targets for this contest must meet the following requirements:
1. Right Ascension (RA) greater than 14 hours OR less than 1 hour.
2. Declination (Dec) between -90 degrees and +10 degrees.

Hints and Suggestions

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long walk down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." [1]
How to choose a target from amongst all that space? Here are a few ideas and things to keep in mind.

One approach is to decide what category of object would be interesting to study, and then to identify a particular example within the positional limitations given above. What kind of target would you like to see in your image... a galaxy cluster? an individual galaxy? (a spiral galaxy? an elliptical galaxy? an irregular galaxy?) a star cluster? a nebula? Once you've identified the category of object you're after, you could try searching online for specific targets.

There are also some great computer programs you can use to help find targets, such as WorldWide Telescope, Google Sky, Chromoscope, WikiSky, and Stellarium.

To make sure the object is visible during the contest, you can search for its coordinates on SIMBAD, an enormous online catalogue of celestial objects. The coordinates you want to look at from SIMBAD are the ICRS coordinates on the first line. For example, the entry for M31 reads:
00 42 44.31 +41 16 09.4
meaning its RA is 00 hours, 42 minutes, 44.31 seconds; and its declination is +41 degrees, 16 arcminutes, 9.4 arcseconds. Because M31's declination is greater than +10 degrees, it is not an eligible target for the contest.

Astronomers use images to learn about all of the types of objects listed above:

What kinds of measurements could you make for your selected target?

Try to think about the kinds of astronomy images that you find awe-inspiring. Often, these have a range of colours and a mixture of stars, gas, and/or dust. What features do you want your image to have?

An important item to remember is that the instrument used for the contest, the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), will produce an image that is 5.5-arcminutes wide and 5.5-arcminutes high. Five arcminutes is about one-sixth the diameter of the Moon. That covers an area much larger than the cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope. So, whereas Hubble is great for seeing the details on small scales, Gemini excels in providing the larger context. The blurring effects of the atmosphere mean that the smallest features that will be resolved in the contest image will have angular sizes of about 0.8-arcseconds. With these constraints, most objects within the Solar System will not make good targets because the images would not be sharp enough. In addition, most stars visible to the naked eye would be problematically bright.

For even more examples of what Gemini and GMOS can do, check out the Gemini image galleries. If an object is already in the gallery, it's probably not a good choice for this contest!

Teachers: If your school has more than two potential entries, consider using the opportunity to re-create the process astronomers use to award telescope time. Allow the students to present a short argument in favour of their idea, and have everyone rank all of the proposals. Then submit the two entries with the highest average scores.

Previous Results

The Glowing Eye Nebula. Image credit: Daniel Tran (PAL College), Travis Rector (U. Alaska Anchorage), Terry Bridges (Queen's U.), and the Australian Gemini Office The image at the right shows the "Glowing Eye" planetary nebula, the Grand Prize winner in our 2009 contest. The winning entry was submitted by Year 10 student, Daniel Tran, of PAL College in Cabramatta, NSW. For more information about last year's contest, check out this page.

The Canadian Gemini Office has also run similar competitions in 2002, 2005, and 2009.

Calendar

Contact Info

For further inquiries, please contact Dr. Christopher Onken of the Australian Gemini Office by e-mail at geminicontest@mso.anu.edu.au, or by phone on (02) 6125 8039.

Details of Observations

Because the Gemini Observatory wants to make the best possible use of every part of the nighttime darkness, it matches the observations it obtains to the changing atmospheric conditions over the course of the night. As a result, it's not certain when any particular program will be observed. Therefore, we won't know precisely when the images for the contest will be taken, and the students participating in the winning program will not be able to travel to the telescope. When the observations are taken, the students will be notified and a message will be posted on the contest News page, which will be updated throughout the year.

The Gemini Observatory

Named for the constellation of Gemini, "the twins", the Gemini Observatory consists of a pair of telescopes. One of these is located atop Cerro Pachon in the Andes Mountains of Chile; the other is on top of Mauna Kea in Hawai'i. At 8-metres in diameter, the Gemini telescopes are among the largest optical telescopes in the world, and are the premier facilities to which the entire Australian astronomical community has access. The particular instrument used in the contest is GMOS, the Gemini Mulit-Object Spectrograph, which provides the ability both to take fantastic images and to study the spectra of several hundred objects at a time. Each of the Gemini telescopes has a copy of the GMOS instrument, and they are the most heavily used instruments in Gemini's toolbox. For more information about Gemini, visit the Gemini Observatory website, see the Gemini FAQ, or go to the home page of the Australian Gemini Office.

Contest Organisers

The Australian Gemini Office
in conjunction with
Dr. Terry Bridges (Queen's University, Canada)
Mr. Robert Hollow (CSIRO/ATNF)
Ms. Helen Sim (CSIRO/ATNF)

Additional Legalities

This contest is open to high school students in Australia. The Gemini Observatory image produced in conjunction with this contest shall be made available to the press and shall be subject to the Gemini Observatory Image Usage Policy. All decisions of the judging panel and the contest organisers shall be final.
Australian Gemini Office, ausgo -@- aao.gov.au