The Sky this Summer

It's almost time for our final show of the 2013-14 academic year. We'll cover current astronomy news (such as an earth-sized planet discovered within a star's habitable zone) as well as highlights of the summer skies. If your summer plans will take you outside at night, this is a great oppotunity to find out what you may see.

THE SKY THIS SUMMER

Sunday, May 4, at 4:00 PM
Tuesday, May 6, at 7:00 PM

The show will last about 50 minutes. Always free. All are welcome.

Late April Astrominute

The late April Gettysburg Astrominute is online and on WZBT. Once again, we made a video to go with it. 

Audio only version: http://public.gettysburg.edu/~iclarke/hatter/podcasts/astrominute041514.mp3

The Sky this Month: April

Show times:

Sunday, April 6, 4 PM
Tuesday, April 8, 7 PM

Lunar eclipse visible locally, opposition of Mars, and more!

Observing Report, 3/31

Monday lab had some intersting times at the observatory on March 31. The sky was clear, moonless, and beautiful. We reviewed some celestial sphere terms from the first session, but the focus of the night was imaging.

First up, we did some afocal photography of Jupiter. That's taking an amage with a camera through the telescope's eyepiece. Here is a collage of student cell phone photos of Jupiter.

By John Laurine, Aleksandra Petkova, Kelly Johnson, Jared Leon.

Prime focus (camera replaces the eyepiece) photography proved a little more challenging, as some technical problems limited what we could do. But we did take a couple of successful images with our CCD camera.

M81. Galaxy 12 million light years away.

M42, Great Orion Nebula.

We were able to see Mars in the southeast by the end of the evening.

Finally, we tried again for a timelapse of circumpolar motion in the northern sky. Unfortunately, the camera stopped after a few minutes, but I finished the job at home:

Observing report 3/20 and 3/24

Orion over the observatory dome, 3/24.

Monday and Thursday labs completed their first observing sessions. Everybody had a celestial sphere orientation, tour of the observatory, and a telescope view of a few objects (Orion Nebula, M67 from the HR Diagram Lab, and Jupiter). Clouds rolled through during on Thursday evening, but all sessions had at least some clear skies.

We attempted a timelapse of circumpolar motion, but mostly we got clouds!