Guilford College Cline Observatory

Thanks to all who came last night. As I feared, Mercury, Venus, and Neptune were all too close to the Sun to see, but we watched Saturn, Jupiter, the Moon, and even Uranus. I didn't get any images of Jupiter, but Io went behind the planet while we were watching it! Here are images of Saturn (you can see the rings in front of the planet!) and Uranus (with two moons and a photobombing human satellite). Please message me if you'd like to get added to our email list for announcements about future events (they'll also be posted here, of course). Hope to see you next time!

I had a nice night on the roof with a student. We got the camera back on and aligned, we worked out a focus model for each filter, and we got the autoguiding working again (we had taken the camera off to let people look through the 16-inch telescope for the planetary alignment open houses earlier in the year). Next step is to make a new set of darks and flats! There was a beautiful crescent Moon, so I snapped a few images and then stiched them together later. Usually the Moon is too bright for the 16-inch telescope, but there was so little of it being illuminated that we could get away with it. I also got a nice image of M101 -- the Pinwheel Galaxy. It will look better once we get the darks and flats ready.

Good morning,

We are gearing up to announce our next observatory open house event, in late April, which will feature a guest speaker! Chris Rowe from the Greensboro Astronomy Club will present on Black Holes: The Weirdest Places in the Universe.

Before we announce the details, though, I want to ask for your help. We at Guilford College have never charged admission to our open houses, and we never will, but the college is going through a financial crisis right now, and funds are tight. If you value the experience of our presentations, and you appreciate being able to look through telescopes on the roof, I hope you will consider making a donation to the College. General donations to the "Loyalty Fund" will help the college survive, and if you would like to support the Observatory specifically (I do have broken equipment that would be really great to repair or replace!), you can also donate to the Physics Department specifically. Thank you for considering it, and whether you can support financially or not, we appreciate your being a part of our events, and we hope to see you in a few weeks!

Follow this link to donate:

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Two announcements: I just posted about our next open house, and I also wanted to share a neat set of images of the Moon moving away from Mars last night about 10:30 pm. If the weather allows, we should be able to see many planets on January 25th -- I hope you can come!

The Fall semester has begun. Students are back, classes are underway, the nights are getting longer... and we are planning for the Fall observatory open houses! The first one will be Sept 21, Prof Thom Espinola will host a presentation about solar activity, space weather, and aurorae. I will make an event announcement in the next few days. Prof Don Smith will do a presentation in October, and Prof Terry Rolfe will do one in November. Specific dates and topics to be determined.

I didn't get as much done over the summer as I hoped to, but I did get the autoguiding working on the big telescope, so I can do long exposures now! Here's a 600 s image of the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), a star that underwent a "slow explosion" about 14,000 years ago, and has been drifting apart ever since.

We made the front page of the News & Record! I'm not sure if the article will share. I'll get a picture of it later, if it doesn't. Thanks again to everyone for coming out and being a part of it!

Hide and shriek: Hundreds flock to Guilford College, awestruck over 'cool' eclipse "It's so cool; it's so strange," said Guilford College freshman Frankie McClernon.

Thanks to all who came!!!

It’s a hazy night on the roof… but there’s a moon ring!

I had a nice class last night, teaching students how to take images through three different kinds of telescopes. Here is an image I got of the Moon by holding my phone up to an eyepiece. Also, while I am here, it looks like our next public open house will be Friday, March 15. I will post an official announcement as soon as I can.