One of the joys of my recent semester has been exploring the Chilean night sky – from the comfort of a classroom in Singapore, using the Las Campanas Remote Observatory (LCRO). This system, developed by a fearless crew of entrepreneurs and amateur astronomers in California, opens up the night skies of Chile to our Yale-NUS students. During the Fall 2016 semester, I was using LCRO with our students for final projects, for exercises in astronomical coordinates, and for studying exoplanets. Next semester I am going to be offering an observational astronomy course, and from here in Singapore – having a telescope like this is a lifesaver!  The telescope itself is a 0.3-meter telescope, mounted on a superb Astro-Physics mount, with a FLI ProLine Camera and filters that include gri photometric bands, as well as narrow-band filters like H-alpha, O-III, and S-II. Needless to say, it is a SUPERB system, and I am grateful to Mike Long, and to the Carnegie Observatories for giving me the chance to pilot astronomy projects with undergraduates with LCRO. Below is an image gallery of some of the galaxies and nebulae which were taken during Fall 2016 as part of our Yale-NUS College experiments. Stay tuned for more developments – including my new curriculum for remotely operated telescopes like LCRO!

You can see more about LCRO at the LCRO image gallery link: http://lascampanasremote.org/gallery

And also the LCRO astronomer site: http://lcobot.duckdns.org/cookbook.html

Enjoy the images!