This course contains the links needed for the adult ed galaxies session.

This course contains details and instructions on how to image dense groups of galaxies called Hickson Compact Groups. Here you will find a list of the groups, together with details on their sizes and when they are observable from FTN and FTS, together with instructions on how to create a mosaic image of the larger Hickson galaxy groups.

In 1923 Hubble was studying novae in M31 (now known as the Andromeda Galaxy), when he realised that one of the objects he was observing was in fact a Cepheid variable. Earlier that century, a female astronomer, Henrietta Leavitt, discovered a relation between the period of Cepheid variables and their luminosity, which allowed their distances to be calculated. Hubble studied galaxy distances using Cepheids as his measuring tool, and in 1929 published his results. His plot of the velocity of galaxies vs. their distance showed that most galaxies are moving away from us, and the further away they are, the faster they are moving. This became known as Hubble's Law.

In this activity you will use Hubble's original data from 1929 to find a value for Hubble's constant and calculate the age of the Universe. You will then use more recent data to plot your own Hubble diagram, and find more accurate values for these.

In the 1920's, Edwin Hubble, after proving that other galaxies were located outside of our own Galaxy, introduced a way of classifying galaxies according to their appearance and illustrated his classification scheme with his famous ʻtuning fork diagram'.

In this project you will use data taken with the Faulkes Telescopes, to produce colour images of galaxies of different types, and create your own FT tuning fork diagram.

It is now generally accepted that at the centre of active galaxies lies a black hole, which is accreting a disk of gas. Some of these disks produce jets, highly energetic plumes of hot, ionized gas which are propelled by twisted magnetic fields in the galaxy's gas.

In this project you will use data taken with the Faulkes Telescopes to produce a colour image of the active galaxy, M87 and its jet, and measure the size of the jet using SalsaJ.

The generally accepted model for structure formation in the Universe present is that smaller objects formed first in the Universe, and that through a series of mergers, began forming the larger galaxies which we see today. Observations of interacting galaxies give a snap-shot in time of collisions which actually last billions of years. By using computer simulations to model these interactions, astronomers can look into the past and the future of these encounters and look at how structure formed in the Universe.

In this project you will use the Java applet applet, 'Galaxy Crash' (written by Chris Mihos, Case Western University, USA - http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/JavaLab/), to simulate interactions of galaxies. You will create tidal tails and elliptical galaxies, and reproduce the types of galaxy interactions which we observe today.

In this project you image some galaxies and comment on the features visible in them. You will then make various quantitative measurements including the pitch angles of the spiral arms and how large the central bulge is relative to the whole visible galaxy. Finally you will classify your galaxies according to the Hubble galaxy classification.

This is a straightforward project to image a number of interacting galaxies in colour, and then to identify different features visible in the images. Students can also make basic measurements on their interacting galaxies, (for example, how far apart they are in the sky) using a simple spreadsheet based measuring tool, the JPEG Viewer.

In this project you will image some galaxies, comment scientifically on the images and obtain surface brightness profiles which you analyse using a spreadsheet tool. This will enable you to see how the surface brightness decreases with distance from the centre of the galaxy and make measurements of some relevant parameters. This information can then be correlated with the Hubble galaxy classification.