The corn is starting to dry out, so it must be time for the Fall semester to start up again. Here at JCCC, though, the work doesn’t stop just because its Summertime. This past summer term, I had an honors student that worked on astrophotography and differential photometry. Both were fun projects, and I’ll write [...]

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Rather than using the SBIG ST-8 CCD camera, I opted for my Nikon D90 for these photos. In some respects its better, in other ways not so much. First stop: The Sun. In this image, you can see the Sun’s chromosphere and a small prominence on the left side of the image. The camera doesn’t [...]

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Here is a mosaic of the first quarter moon taken this last Wednesday, March 5th. The individual images were collected with a Nikon D90 threaded to the Meade 12″ SCT. The separate images were then assembled using GIMP, an open-source image manipulation program.

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Here are two mosaics of the Sun stitched together with images collected on Wednesday afternoon. These images were taken with a Nikon D90 through a 12″ Meade SCT fitted with an H-alpha filter. The first mosaic is of the full disc of the Sun. There are some details, but the glare of the photosphere, even [...]

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Ok, it’s not the greatest picture, but we still are dealing with the wind shaking the telescope. You can see a couple of sunspots from, though. These are spots associated with the new solar cycle, #24. Note their latitude. Sunspots early in a solar cycle will form at high latitudes at first. Later in the [...]

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This pic of the Moon and Venus conjunction was taken on New Year’s Eve 2008.

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First of all, the photos below were not taken by me, but by my honors student this semester. So far, the images have been pretty good, given the level of light pollution here in the middle of town. All of these images were aquired using our 12″ Meade SCT and an SBIG ST-8XME [...]

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