University of Manitoba students advance research with new remote observatory

The students and staff can operate the telescope remotely using a secure computer link, avoiding long nights outside in the cold.

Twenty minutes south of the Perimeter Highway, University of Manitoba students have built a new telescope to capture their own raw footage of the night sky.

The Glenlea Remote Observatory contains a telescope that can rotate 360 degrees. It works much faster than the other telescopes at the university, and enables students to track moving objects like comets and satellites.

Best of all, they don’t even need to be on site to use it.

“What was normally an on-site activity — students would have to drive out here in the cold and the rain to operate this telescope — now they can do so completely remotely from a secure computer link,” says graduate student Ryan Wierckx, who led the design and assembly of the project.

Before it can be fully operational, they need some clear skies so they can calibrate the telescope’s position. They’re hopeful it will be up and running within a few weeks, and they can start collecting and processing their data — which is not always something university students get to do.

“A lot of the images we get from Hubble and from NASA are already processed, whereas in this case we’re actually learning the process of, for example, editing the pictures to ensure they’re correct,” says graduate student Charles Lee

According to assistant professor Tyrone Woods, now they don’t need to wait until they graduate to gain these skills, and have a professional astronomy experience.

“Following exploding stars, supernovae, as well as other variable stars that change over time, and tell us subtle hints into their distances from us and the nature of their evolution,” says Woods.