Welcome to

The Duke Teaching Observatory

Public Event Schedule for Fall 2008:

Click on event to see what we may look at

Click on time to check for last-minute cancellations and weather info

To subscribe to the observatory calendar using iCal click here

or enter http://www.phy.duke.edu/calendars/observatory.ics

into your calendar.

Mission:

The Duke Teaching Observatory, founded in 2002, is an observational facility designed with two missions:

• Enhance Astronomy instruction at Duke by providing hands-on observation experiences and opportunities for small-scale research projects to students.

• Serve as a platform for outreach activities, helping to enhance science education in local schools by providing opportunities to experience astronomical observations and to meet with Duke faculty and students in an informal learning situation.

Find information on the history of the observatory at the previous website.

Facility:

The observatory currently operates five Meade LX200 GPS Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes. For details on the telescopes, check out the user manual or the assembly instructions. Housed in a shed on-site they are assembled for each session. Nine piers, with power outlets, have been installed to encourage visiting observers to set up their own equipment. Located in the Duke Forest, the observatory is operated and maintained by the Duke Physics Department as part of our overall educational outreach effort.

Activities:

The observatory is regularly used by students in Physics 55, the undergraduate introductory course in astronomy at Duke. To the extent possible, it is open every Friday evening for free public viewing. Check the calendar or the onornot file to see when these are available. The site is also used by CHAOS, the Chapel Hill Amateur Observation Society, for some of their observation meetings. Check their site for schedules. School groups are invited to arrange scheduled visits at other times.

Today's lunar phase (from USNO)

Clear Dark Sky Clock (by A. Danko using data from the Canadian Meteorological Center). Click on the clock for more detail.

Calendar of Public Activities:

Days in bright green have activity scheduled. Click on a bright green square to see whether planned activity is "on or not," given weather conditions, and to find out meeting times, which change with the seasons as sunset times change.

Contact Us:

To schedule a visit to the observatory contact Ronen Plesser at plesser@cgtp.duke.edu .

Directions:

The observatory is located in the Duke Forest, on Cornwallis Rd, about one mile west of Kerley. Driving west on Cornwallis, access is through a Duke Forest gate on the left hand side of the road. (The gate is usually locked unless observatory is open). The gravel road through the gate forks soon. Follow the road to the right around a large shed and park in front of the shed. Turn off car headlights as soon as you have stopped! Walk down the hill to your left (away from Cornwallis) to the observatory site, about 150ft. A radio tower with a flashing red light, also to the left of the road, is just west of our site. If you get to the radio tower, you have gone too far. Click here for a map and directions.

What Can we see?:

With our telescopes, we can make out details of the Moon's surface (central peaks of craters, for example); we can see four of Jupiter's moons and clearly make out the Cassini gap in Saturn's rings; we can make out some asteroids; we can see the glowing gases of the Orion nebula or the ring nebula; we can see several galaxies and many beautiful star clusters. We cannot, for example, see the spiral structure of Andromeda. We can make out the colors of stars, especially when looking at differently-colored members of a binary pair, but for the most part objects appear too faint for our eyes to register color well.

You can find out more about highlights of this month's viewing from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics among other sites.