OBSERVATION III. (Waiting for the last contacts)

  From 9:30 to 11:30. - At about 11:00 the students change the three-hour video tapes. And  Diego controls the movement of the motors of the telescope following the centroid of the planet on the laptop screen.....

....and Ovidio watches the videos... - Daniel and the English teacher try to put on the school´s website Website of Secondary Education School ESTUARIA (Huelva), the images recorded with the digital camera, but they didn´t get it, (according to them, the one to blame was the IT teacher, who was busy checking the activity in the hall, his hand is in the Photo, it signal the centroid). They also watch the transit in order to get fix images with the camera,capturing those moments when Venus was superposed on sun spots, something that did not happened. And Diego got the first shot with the LPI at 10:31:18, local time.

  Venus in a false colour at 8:31:27 T.U. TEAM 5. In the picture, the teacher Isabel Conde gives out glasses to the students of 2º C.

-They check every half hour the syncronizing of  T. U. using a chronometer and the PC03 computer from the IT Room with the STOPER program. They wrote down the incidents related to the bad adjustement of the recording clocks and the chronometer. But they did not touch the clocks of the videos for the whole activity. However, they will be taken into account when giving the data to the Southern European Observatory (ESO). In the meanwhile, the classes 1 st   and 2 nd A and B come down in thirty-minute turns, accompanied and organized by their corresponding teacher, who will be in charge of taking them down and back again and calling the next turns in alphabetical order. In those turns, some of the members of the Astronomy Association answered the students´ questions and explained what they were watching on the monitors about Venus transit.

From 11:30 to 12:00 (Break time).   Half of the organizing students have a rest while the others watch helped by one of the teachers on duty during break time so that nobody goes beyond the fences that give access to the other side of the patio or purposely interferes on the functioning of the equipment.

In the photos: Rocío keeps on working while their classmates in Sciece Methods keep away from the sun and have a rest.(36º degrees in the shadow, 42º C at handcontrol telescope MEADE GPS in the sun).  The organizing teachers control the equipements and the members of the Astronomy Association give explanations for the other teachers who come by to have a look. ( The janitors are told to offer them coffee and something for breakfast). The bell rings to go back to class, but some students of 2º C and D loiter to stay behind together with those students who take part in the activity..... Go back to main page     or    go on