The Faulkes Telescope Project (FTP) was established to inspire  young students to study and take part in real science.

Supported by the Dill Faulkes Educational Trust, through the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO),  FTP provides access to observing time on research-class telescopes across the world. This time is dedicated to education and public outreach, mainly in the UK, but also for smaller, selected projects in Europe and the US.

The Beginning…

FTP has operated a UK-wide educational programme since 2004, when it began with access to two 2-metre telescopes in Hawaii and Australia. These telescopes (called the Faulkes Telescopes or FTs), and the education team supporting their use in the classroom were funded by Dill Faulkes, who wanted to enthuse, engage and inspire learners in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects, using astronomy as the hook.

 

Early research

The two Faulkes Telescopes were originally controlled in real-time, with schools logging into a specially-designed interface to control them and take images of the cosmos.

But it wasn’t all just pretty pictures – professional astronomers were keen to get involved with schools and make use of the real-time facility which was unique to these telescopes.

When NASA fired a copper ‘bullet’ into the Tempel 1 comet in 2005, the first images obtained from Earth were taken by a group of Faulkes Telescope North users from Hawaiian and Icelandic schools, working with Professor Alan Fitzsimmons’ team from Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

 

Spreading out…

FTP then began to branch out internationally – in September 2006, a British Council-funded project, involving schools and astronomers from Russia, was launched in Moscow, with 24 schools from five regions of Russia working with local astronomers to study galaxies, asteroids and supernovae, to make a genuine contribution to scientific knowledge using the FTs.

 

Collaboration

FTP continues to work with science education projects across Europe and further afield (e.g. USA, Russia, Israel), including many EU-based science, maths and ICT programmes. These include Discover the Cosmos, Go-Lab, PLATON and the recently funded (as of Sept 2018), Online Observatories project.

Collaboration is key to success in research, and we want school students to experience these opportunities through the many projects we are involved in.

 

More telescopes

In late 2005, the 2-m Faulkes Telescopes became part of a much bigger network of telescopes, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCO). This network now contains 21 telescopes located across the world, the majority of which are available to schools signed up with the FTP.

Join us!

After a period of queue-only observing on the LCO network, the real-time observing facility has been reintroduced to FTP users. Thus, schools in the UK and EU can now access a network of telescopes across the world, take images and data in either real-time or through scheduled observations, and work with astronomers on real research.

This is an exciting time for the FTP team – we hope you join us on our journey as we bring the Universe to your classroom – who knows what discoveries you’ll make!