"Astro à l'école" hardware

As soon as the college's scientific workshop was created, we asked for the loan of astronomical material

The material includes:
- a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a diameter of 203 mm.
- a German equatorial mount motorized in straight ascension and declination with a "Goto" pointing function (automated pointing allowing a significant saving of time).
- a detector: a modified webcam for long exposure.
- a laptop.
- various accessories such as eyepieces of different focal lengths, a flip mirror, a focal reducer, a 1 / 100000e solar filter, an autonomous power supply.

This equipment allows to reach weak objects, it is adapted to elaborate and demanding projects. It allows pedagogical teams to produce, in some cases, real scientific data that can be used by the scientific community. It allows, in any case, to take pictures of 1 or even 2 minutes without autoguiding. These images can then be accumulated in order to increase the signal to noise ratio and to obtain images of weakly luminous objects such as the small bodies of the solar system (eg comets), the gaseous nebulae of our galaxy, Other distant galaxies. These observations involve computerized signal processing procedures that are very educationally rich.
Credit: D. Costa