Moorhead’s astronomy professor can now operate the telescope from his couch

MOORHEAD A professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at Minnesota State University’s Moorhead is sleeping a lot more these days and doing more work at the same time.

Matt Craig now has the ability to operate the telescope at the MSUM Regional Science Center near Buffalo River State Park from his home in Moorhead.

I can operate the telescope from my sofa, he said.

Three of his students who do research at the observatory also have that remote access from where they live.

We’ve found that we can make a lot more observations when we don’t have to stay up all night, he said.

Craig and his students are involved in two main research areas.

The university is part of a large NASA project looking for planets outside our solar system, including those that could support life. NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, in 2018.

Craig also studies variable stars, or those that change brightness over time.

With the old control system, he had to stay up all night at the observatory and move the telescope every time he wanted to capture a different object in the sky.

He calculates that in the last 10 years he has spent the night there on 60-70 occasions.

There are only so many nights a week that you can do this, especially if you have to be in class the next morning,” she said with a laugh. In some classes, I got pretty punchy because I was pretty tired.

Five years ago, an update allowed Craig and the students to program the telescope to move multiple times at night with a series of commands, but someone still had to physically open the dome above the telescope at night and go back to close it in the morning.

Installation of the new remote system at the observatory began last June, but extreme temperatures created some problems.

In mid-May of this year, the automation was finalized and since then Craig has used the remote method about 10 times.

We’re still waiting for another rig so we can go back to shooting color if we want, but other than that it’s working, he said.

Using a special home-based website, Craig can open the dome above the telescope, reposition the telescope, and program the connected camera to take images throughout the night.

Essentially what we’re doing is an overnight photoshoot, but we have the computer set up to do the photoshoot for us, he said.

From each of these images, data about the captured object is extracted and recorded.

The smoke from the wildfires in Canada made it a little more challenging.

A layer of smoke will reflect moonlight or the lights on the FM tube, making things look brighter than they are, Craig said.

After the photo shoot, the system takes a series of calibration images around sunrise and then shuts down.

When Craig wakes up in the morning, he makes sure the dome is closed and the telescope is back in the park position.

In early summer, their search is limited to looking at variable stars because the nights are so short, with true darkness only lasting about two hours.

The search for exoplanets takes much longer, so the search will resume later this summer.

This fall, MSUM students who are enrolled in an observational astronomy class can begin collecting, analyzing and submitting exoplanet data to the NASA project.

The only real problem we’ve had in the last few weeks has involved a bug that somehow got into the telescope.

It’s been removed, but Craig thinks a small part of the bug may remain further down the camera because there’s still a small flaw in the images.

That job will likely be for another day and one that won’t be handled from the comfort of a sofa.