Transcript

INSTRUCTOR:

So, though the top of Mount Teide is an excellent observing site, we are still at the mercy of the weather. And as you can see by the clouds gathering around me, it's an important thing for us to monitor. It may not look like much, but at the top of this pole is our weather station. We can monitor here humidity, the amount of rainfall, the wind speed, the wind direction, and various other parameters that allow us to keep the observatory safe.

We've also got, at the top of this pole, they all sky camera that you were looking at images from earlier. We also have the webcam, which if you're on the telescope.org website, you'll be able to use to have a look at facilities. The Open University has two observatories here on Teide. The furthest one from me is COAST, but right next to me, we have PIRATE.

PIRATE is the largest facility we have on site. It's exclusively used for research and by our undergraduate students. But as part of this course, you'll be using COAST. So the COAST telescope is housed inside a clam shell-style dome. Because the dome drops completely out of the way, we can observe one object after another without having to worry about rotating the dome at all. It's also a very robust style dome, which is great for protecting the telescopes. Let's have a look inside.

So here, we have the COAST telescope housed inside its clam shell dome, which-- don't forget-- with the aid of the weather station, will automatically shut should should the weather get bad, to protect the telescope. So don't worry, you can't break it. The slightly unusual looking mount that we have here is because it's in equatorial mount. This axis is aligned to the north celestial pole and allows us to track objects across the sky without moving into many other dimensions with the telescope. So we can do some nice long exposure photographs.

What we use for those photographs is the telescope itself mounted at the top here. We also have the camera on the back, and the coloured filters here. And if you want to watch COAST taking your observations via the telescope.org website, you can take a look through the webcam that we've got hiding up here.