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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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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Here’s the first truly successful color image from the JCCC rooftop. The observation deck on top of the Classroom-Laboratory Building (CLB) is good for casual observing, but the telescope mounts aren’t really isolated from the rest of the building, so wind and building vibrations really hamper what can be done with photometry. However, [...]

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