News and Events
January 2007: John Blackwell, along with two other high school astronomy teachers, authored a poster which has been presented at this year's American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin,Texas. The poster, Education with Infrared Astronomy and Spitzer, details the use of our recent experiences in collecting and analyzing data from the Spitzer Space Telescope through a program offered by the Spitzer Science Center and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. The poster may be downloaded as a PDF file here.
November 2007: Three students generated a proposal to use the Kitt Peal National Observatory 0.9m telescope to do an imaging series on the Andromeda Galaxy, M-31, in order to create a new digital atlas of the area. The proposal was accepted by the Astronomy Research Based Science Education directors earlier this month. The plan is to make a fully digital atlas of M-31 in V, B, R, and H-alpha wavelengths. The trip took Mr. Blackwell and the students to Arizona from November 27th to the 30th. One clear night allowed for taking images in V, but the other data sets will have to wait until another time, as the weather declined on the second night. Further announcements about the project will be posted here.
September 2007: Students have had their research work on the eclipsing binary star, U Pegasi, published in the Research Based Science Education Journal – 2007. The project involved three PEA students who used the Kitt Peak National Observatory Coude Feed Spectrograph to record time series spectra of the star during the spring term of 2007. To see the journal article please follow this link to the PDF file (3.93Mb): Spectral and Photometric Analysis of Eclipsing Binary U Pegasi
August 20, 2007: A new telescope has arrived! The observatory is now the proud home to a new Takahashi FRC-300 Flat Field Ritchey-Chretien telescope. This tube assembly will be placed in the Alden Dome and will be dedicated to CCD photometry and astrometry. The fast focal ratio (f/5) will allow imaging of very faint subjects in short time frames.
April 2007: The Phillips Exeter Academy Astronomy Club has been accepted into the NASA/JPL/ASP Night Sky Network Program which promotes public outreach in astronomy education through local clubs. More information can be found on their website at: http://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/
December 2006: John Blackwell, Grainger Observatory, and Hughes Pack, Northfield Mount Hermon Observatory, collaborated on a one night observing run to observe the eclipsing binary star, U Pegasi. The 5 hour long observing session ran through the night on November 25th and used telescopes at both observatories. The results, shown in the light curve plot below, speak for themselves. The data has been handed into the American Association of Variable Star Observers for use by other astronomers around the world. Now that we have shown this to be a viable project, we hope to have student involvement in this type of research throughout the year.
November 2006: Announcing the First Grainger Astronomy Conference. This coming June 2007, Phillips Exeter Academy will hold the first of three conferences on astronomy education. Information and contact information is located here.
20-January-2006: The observatory has received a new 12" diameter Meade Dobsonian telescope for quick views of faint deep sky objects. This is the latest in the Meade line of telescopes, a truss-tubed Dobsonian that is manually driven and fun to use. More information about this telescope can be found online at: http://www.meade.com/lightbridge/index.html.
24-October-2005: We have just received a new lens system which will bring our 14" telescope in the robotic observatory to a much shorter focal length: f/1.95 What does this mean for us? We can now see a huge piece of sky with our digital imaging cameras which will allow us to search the sky for new phenomena much faster than before.
29-July-2005: The Kurtz Dome has a new visiting telescope! A 10" diameter f/16 classical cassegrain has made its way onto the Paramount in the Kurtz Dome and will be staying for a while. The telescope was received in exchange for one of the director's personal solar filters from NHAS member Michael Townsend. For viewing small objects, like planets, double stars, and planetary nebulae, this telescope will excel.
15-July-2005: John Blackwell, the observatory director is back from a marvelous trip to Arizona and the Kitt Peak Observatory. This was part of an NSF/NOAO grant program called Teacher Leaders in Research Based Science Education (TLRBSE) which has the goal of training science educators to be mentors to new science teachers. Teachers also use the telescopes on Kitt Peak for research and are then allowed to bring students to Kitt Peak for additional research. See the press release at: http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr05/pr0507.html
7-May-2005: Students in the Astronomy-III class visited the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord, NH for their celebration of Astronomy Day called Spacetacular Saturday. The weather did not cooperate, but we had a fun time exploring the exhibits and seeing the Einstein's Universe show.
May 2005: We were visited by Simon DeDeo (Princeton) an Exeter alumn who is just about finished with his PhD in cosmology. He presented a wonderful talk on dynamic friction within galaxy collisions which had the physics and astronomy students eager for more!
1-May-2005: The observatory now has a new CCD imager, an SBIG ST-2000XM which sports 1600 x 1200 pixels each only 7.4 microns square in size. This allows us to image more of the sky at a time and is perfect for this semester's supernovae hunting project being undertaken by the Astronomy-III class. The smaller ST-7 CCD will now be permanently mounted to the SBIG Self-Guiding Spectrograph thus reducing the time to swap instrumentation on a busy night.
