photo courtesy the banff centre
DESCRIPTION
What people are saying about the King’s Observatory…. It may not be big but it is small!. Photo courtesy The Banff Centre. A Brief History …. A Brief History …. Built in 1993 from completely recycled materials! Split roof design with attached warm-room Fully networked and web accessible - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Photo courtesy The Banff Centre
What people are saying about the King’s Observatory…
It may not be big but it is
small!
A Brief History …
A Brief History …• Built in 1993 from completely recycled materials!• Split roof design with attached warm-room• Fully networked and web accessible• Used an average of 80 nights per year• To date over 9 thousand “observation-hours”• Has undergone 3 generations of telescopes/detectors
– 0.20 m Newtonian– 0.30 m Newtonian– 0.36 m Schmidt-Cassegrain
• Equipped for high precision photometry, spectroscopy and narrow-band imagery as well as auroral, geomagnetic studies and all-sky meteor camera
• Collaborated in more than 30 professional publications in refereed journals
Student Research…
• How old are the stars?– Colour-magnitude diagram M37
• The Dangers of gaining mass!– Nova Cass 1993 – Supernova 2004ET
• Things That Go Bump in the Night– BY Cam, DL Pegasi and AE Uma
• Way Out There!– Red shift of 3C 273
How old are the stars?
•Rob Haasdyk – senior thesis project 1992
•Tyler Foster
Published in Sky & Telescope magazine, May 1993.
The Dangers of gaining mass!• Nova Cassiopeia 1993
– Kerry Kejiwski (UofA)– Tyler Foster (Kings)
More Dangers of gaining mass!• Supernova 2004ET
– Sam Zondervan, Senior Thesis project 2005
Things That Go Bump in the Night
• Photometry on SX Phoenicis Stars by– Shane Strydhorst (AE-UMa – Senior Thesis project 1996, poster presented at
Canadian Astronomical Society Annual General Meeting, June 1996 – acknowledged in Time-Series Ensemble Photometry of SX Phoenicis Stars. II. AE Ursae Majoris.Hintz, E.; Hintz, Maureen L.; Joner, Michael
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, v.109, p.1073-1076)
– Nathan Wielenga (BL Cam – Astro 300, Fall 2009)
Way Out There!• Measuring the redshift of Quasar 3C 273
Matt Glenn, senior thesis project, spring 2011
Redshift z = 0.16 indicating recessional velocity of 45 000 km/s and distance 2.4 billion light years!
Community Service…
• School groups, cub scouts etc• King’s Astropic of the Week
H
OIII
SII
L
The Crab Nebula
Astronomy Labs (Non-science majors) …
Astronomy Labs (Non-science majors) …
Lunar Craters and Impact in the Solar
System
The Jovian System and Rotational Flattening
Basic Research…
• Active collaboration with many professional and advanced amateurs world-wide– CBA: Joseph Patterson, Columbia– VSNET: Taichi Kato, Kyoto University
• Primary research areas:• cataclysmic variable stars• SX-Phoenicis and Dwarf Cephied Stars
Some Sample Pubs…
Future Directions?
Thank you any questions?
