| Once you have
the coordinates of the 5 galaxies, the next step is to actually get pictures
of them. All the telescope work has already been done and the results of
many surveys of the sky are available online. The survey we are going to use
for this first step is the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey which is a digitised
version of survey images from the UK Schmidt telescope (UKST), the ESO
Schmidt, and the Palomar Schmidt telescopes. You can find the website we
need to get our images here:
http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/sss/index.html and it should look something
like this in your browser. |
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| Since what we
want is an image of the galaxy, click on 'get an IMAGE' on the left hand
side. Now the system needs to know where you want to find an image, so type
in the coordinates for your first galaxy into the text field marked 'RA and
DEC'. Leave the 'Equinox' field as it is - this just specifies what
coordinate system you are using, and you are using J2000. Now, it's up to
you to decide how big an image you want, a larger field won't change the
size of your galaxy, it will just show you more of the area around it. You
should choose a field which is large enough to show the whole galaxy, but
small enough to only show the galaxy you want – for the galaxies you will be
looking at, a few arc minutes will be enough to contain the whole galaxy.
The maximum size of image you can retrieve is 15 arcminutes - this is much
bigger than any galaxy you will be looking at. It is important that you note
down the size of each image you extract - especially if you have to change
one of them to show the whole galaxy. You don't need to change the
'survey/waveband' field - you should leave it on 'UKST blue'. Do you wish to
see a GIF image of the result? Yes! Otherwise all you will get is a big long
list of numbers, useful for astronomers but useless for us just now. And
that’s it, hit the send button and you should get an image of your galaxy. |
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| The galaxy will
be the bright object closest to the centre of your field (the images are
negatives so galaxies and stars are black). Your galaxies won't look quite
as nice as this one, but the larger galaxies in your set should look like
galaxies! |
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Once you have the web page with the picture of your galaxy, print it out. You
will need this so that you can measure the size of the galaxy and also to
hand in with your report at the end. Now all you need to do to finish this
stage is repeat the above process for each of your sets of coordinates, and
you will have five pictures of five galaxies. If you want you could save the
file separately and enlarge it then print it off on its own – this isn't
necessary but you wont be penalised for doing this. Remember to keep the
pages you get with the pictures of your galaxies - you will need to hand
these in with your results. |