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What is the Global Jet Watch?

Take a visit to our India school observatory and hear what some of the schoolgirls say about being introduced to astronomy.

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New GJW Publication

The jets of a Galactic microquasar have been imaged for the first time using wavelengths as short as a millimetre. The striking corkscrew shape of the rotating jets shows up beautifully.

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Gresham

Gresham College, London’s oldest Higher Education Institution, has announced the appointment of Professor Katherine Blundell OBE as Gresham Professor of Astronomy from 2019.

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Operation Solar Farmyard

We have installed a solar farm for GJW-IN. We collect light energy from our nearest star by day, and store this as chemical energy in big batteries to use by night to observe many different stars across our Galaxy.

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Marching Band

The school that hosts our observatory in rural southern India gave a magnificent welcome to Professor Stephen Blundell during a servicing mission to the GJW-IN observatory.

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Buckingham Palace

Professor Katherine Blundell received an OBE from HRH The Duke of Cambridge for services to astronomy and the education of young people. This was in recognition of her designing and directing Global Jet Watch.

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8.4-magnitude earthquake

On Wednesday 16 September, an 8.4-magnitude earthquake hit Chile. Its epicentre was just over 40 miles away from our observatory there, GJW-CL. We are very thankful nobody at the school was injured.

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Our fifth observatory

Our fifth observatory, GJW-WA, was enabled by a generous gift to the University of Oxford from Derek Benham of New York. Derek was a wonderful friend and supporter of Global Jet Watch. The whole team is very sad to learn of Derek’s passing, and we send our deepest condolences to his wife Joan.

OBSERVATORIES

The Global Jet Watch project consists of five observatories strategically distributed in longitude around Planet Earth, such that there is always one of these in darkness.  Optical astronomy has to be done at night!   Our observatories are equipped with research-grade instrumentation and telescopes.  They are located in the following places: 

AMATEURS

If you are an amateur astronomer and you have a telescope, cooled monochrome CCD camera and narrow band filters and would be willing to collect some images for us over an extended period of time, we would be very interested in hearing from you. Please fill in this form, to indicate your interest and we’ll be in touch!