The Faulkes Telescope Project was officially represented this year at the BT Young Scientist of the Year event at the RDS in Dublin, Ireland. The FT Project was part of the BT sponsored Armagh Planetarium arena on Alien environments.

Robert Hill from the Planetarium gave presentations for three days on utilising the telescope with many schools registering for pupil-research projects with local universities.

The event was officially opened by President Mary MacAleese and saw over 600 school projects being displayed with a total of over 100,000 teachers, school pupils, exhibitors and general public attending throughout the event.

Special mention must go to Glenlola Collegiate School, County Down and teacher Mrs Jacqueline Milligan and her 'star' pupils who displayed an excellent project on tracking Near Earth Objects with FT North. There was a lot of interest in their project and the girls from Glenlola did an excellent job of describing their observations and what they learnt. Well done!

The Armagh Planetarium arena was one of the largest areas sponsored by BT and audiences were given a 'walk-through' of the universe. They then had the opportunity to take control of FT North to make their own celestial journey. Despite the Full Moon being high in the sky over Hawaii many observations were made of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and even one or two good images of galaxies being brought live to the exhibition.

More details of the exhibition here http://www.btyoungscientist.ie/