Astrogruppe Cusanusgymnasium Bruneck

 tl;dr - ... does most likely not exist. As every year in March, I attended the Mathematik Modellierungswoche last week, held at the Rechtenthal Castle in the small village of Tramin , South Tyrol. Along with four other STEM teachers, I brought an assignment for five of the most talented students from various schools across the province. Their task was to work on it and get as close to a solution as possible. As usual, my assignment this year came from the wide and never disappointing field of astronomy. Over the past year, I was 'commander-in-chief' of a nice 16-inch remote rental telescope in Australia and used it to image the southern night sky. During the bright moon phases, galaxies and nebulae weren't ideal targets, so I focused on finding interesting star-like objects to point my telescope toward. I can't recall exactly where or when I first read about Gaia BH1, the first stellar black hole discovered by the prolific astrometry satellite Gaia in 2022, but it su...

 tl;dr - On the evening of Sunday, 17.11.24, the International Space Station ISS had a favourable  flyby over our hometown Bruneck. Our observation of the event was extraordinarily thrilling and at least a partial success. After reading about a successful hunt for the ISS by our friend Sebastian Voltmer  in "Sterne und Weltraum" 11/24, I sent out a call for volunteers to follow Sebastian's example on the evening of Sunday, November 17, 2024. When the time came, I was astounded by the number of students who flocked to the "torretta", the observatory of the Istituto Pluricomprensivo Brunico . Altogether, we were nine people crammed into the small space in the dome - even Felix showed up, a "long-lost son" who had not taken part in any of our activities for years.  The "ISS crew", I mean the crew that hunted down the ISS. The passage of the space station, currently home to seven astronauts, was scheduled for 18:34 CET, but we met more than an ho...

 tl;dr - Last week, three members of our school's astronomy group observed the exoplanet TIC 46432937 b using a remote telescope in Southern Australia. The light curve turned out exquisit and was promptly  submitted to the TRESCA database. Our successful observation constitutes a valuable contribution to the understanding of extrasolar planets. Clear autunm skies are usually the best for astronomy. Looking up into the vast blue, you could easily feel drowning. However, not this year. Up to now the first three weeks of September were quite wet, again with an indisputable drowning risk. Luckily, as a local folk song states, the world is "groß und weit", and so the two freshly recruited members of the astronomy group, Magdalena and Miriam, didn't have to wait too long for their first mission. They teamed up with senior astronomer Alex and used a remote telescope in Australia to successfully prey their first exoplanet.  The target, TIC 46432937 b, was only recently discov...

 tldr; - For almost a year now, an all-sky camera has been on duty on the roof of our school. It quite reliably captures approximately 5000 black-and-white frames per 24 hours of the sky above Bruneck, South Tyrol. Recently, we started checking the huge dataset for bright meteors, also called bolides. During our first two-hour search run, we found four; two more followed. (Yes, astrocusanus does homework assignments, too 😉.) In 2019 we won the 'Reiff-Preis', a recognition for our year-long efforts in the field of astronomy at school. With the money awarded to us we were able to fulfill a long held dream of an automated all-sky camera (see "Can't take my eyes off you" ). With this new 'toy' we not only hoped to be able to check on the weather without the bother of looking out of the window. We also were eager to begin a hunt for bright meteors, aka bolides. The bolides search team rocks the (overcast 🥺) sky! Alex, Amy, Letizia, Mara & Christof Wiedema...

 tl;dr - Recently, I decided to share my experience in the field of night photography with my students. Here I present the results of our first excursion, where we targeted Orion, the hunter. In 2018, I decided to give a new hobby a try. Inspired by the work of other TWAN photographers, I started venturing out into the night and taking my first snapshots of the night sky, always along with a nice foreground. Now, in 2023, I deemed the time to be ripe to share my experience with others. Six students of the Cusanusgymnasium Bruneck embraced the opportunity. In the afternoon of 7 December 2022 we had our first meeting, a workshop about the basics of night photography. For over two hours I filled the capacious brains of these youngsters with relevant concepts like polar alignment, guiding, stacking, noise, colour temperature, saturation level, etc. and introduced them to useful apps like Peakfinder or Stellarium .  Painfully aware of this abstract and quite demanding immersion in...

 tl;dr - On 2 March 2022 the observatory "Zwicky Transient Facility" discovered a new comet. The icy wanderer reached its closest approach to earth on 1 February 2023. It did not quite put on a show as comet Neowise in 2020, nevertheless we didn't leave the visitor unattended. Besides taking pictures, we also decided to acquire a spectrum. It is difficult to tell when the best time for amateur astronomy was. I might have been the early 90s, when digital cameras (CCDs) became affordable. It was the time when one could simply walk out into the backyard, take some images through a medium size telescope and discover a previously unknown asteroid or comet. A comet would inherit the name of its discoverer - that's the rule that still applies today! Unfortunately, human discoverers of comets belong to a species in the way of extinction. Automated search programs are the state of the art now and they are shockingly effective. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has a telesco...