Farm Cove Observatory

Story

Farm Cove Observatory is an amateur astronomical observatory in Pakuranga, Auckland, New Zealand, where Jennie McCormick discovered the main-belt asteroid 386622 New Zealand in September 2009.Built in 2000, the observatory has a Meade LX200R 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain F/10 telescope, purchased and on loan from Ohio State University Astronomy Dept. The observatory uses an SBIG ST8XME CCD camera with clear filter for data acquisition, this camera was supplied recently by the Centre for Backyard Astrophysics. FCO is only used for astronomical research.Farm Cove Observatory takes part in cataclysmic variable star research for the Center for Backyard Astrophysics and is also known as CBA Pakuranga. Up to January 2006, FCO has contributed over 1400 hours of data to the CBA, and the data from this observatory has been used in a number of scientific papers.In April 2004 Farm Cove Observatory joined the MicroFUN collaboration headed by Professor Andrew Gould at Ohio State University. The mission of MicroFUN is to obtain intense photometric monitoring of high magnification gravitational microlensing events in the hope of detecting planets orbiting the lensing star. Most of these events are found in the dense star fields of the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy.