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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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The Evening With The Stars this spring had a great turn out. Thanks to all who came out. Leo gave a great talk, and I’ve heard from many of the attendees that they really enjoyed the evening. Unfortunately, the weather was not as cooperative and clouds ruined our planned observing. We’ll try again in the [...]

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The JCCC Science Division presents anEVENING WITH THE STARS April 4th at 7:00pm in the Craig Auditorium, GEB 233 Leo “Bud” Johns of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City will give a presentation on Kings and Queens; Myths and Monsters: A Tour of the Spring Sky Followed by night sky observing, weather permitting, with Prof. [...]

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Here are some nice videos of the Sun as taken by my honors student using our 12″ Meade, a Meade electronic eyepiece, and an H-alpha filter. The wind was brutal, so the images are rather shaky.
This first video highlights the granulation in the photosphere, and the glow of the chromosphere evident above [...]

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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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