草榴社区

Come explore the wonders of the night sky! The 草榴社区 Public Observatory is located on the fourth floor of the Mendel Science Center. The observatory houses a 14" Celestron CGE telescope with a Schmidt-Cassegrain optical design and a selection of eyepieces for optimal observing. The finder scope is a 4" Televue-102 refractor.

Weather permitting, the Observatory is open on Monday through Thursday from 7 鈥� 9 p.m. throughout the fall and spring semesters鈥攖ypically opening at the beginning of the second week of classes each semester and shutting down after the last day of classes. What does "weather permitting" mean?  Basically, if you can see stars, the weather is permitting!

For special group arrangements, please contact Larry DeWarf.

The George P. McCook Observatory on the fourth Floor of Mendel Science Center is the main on-site observatory for students, staff and faculty in the Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Science. Astronomy and Astrophysics students are introduced to the equipment during their sophomore year via the year-long Observational Lab series and many continue observational work in the Observatory throughout their undergraduate careers. The Observatory contains three main telescopes, each equipped with modern computer-controlled digital instrumentation, and provides students a full hands-on learning experience with the acquisition and processing of photometric, spectroscopic and imaging data.

The telescopes include:

1. A PlaneWave Instruments CDK20 20-inch telescope, mounted on a Software Bisque Paramount ME and equipped with a SBIG STX-16803 CCD camera featuring a 4096x4096 pixel array;
2. A Celestron C14 14-inch telescope, mounted on a Paramount ME and equipped with a SBIG ST-8XE CCD camera featuring a 1530x1020 imaging array;
3. A Celestron C14 14-inch telescope, on a DFM Engineering mount and equipped with a SBIG Self Guiding Spectrograph and ST-7XE camera.

In addition, a Meade Coronado SolarMax II 60 solar telescope is side-mounted on one of the 14-inch Celestrons. The telescopes and instrumentation are all computer-controlled from a separate observing room, known as 鈥渢he Greenhouse.鈥�

The Observatory serves some of the main goals of our Department, including teaching fundamental research techniques and instilling in students a sense of joy and the rewards of participating in the development of new knowledge. The research projects carried out by the students on these telescopes help fulfill the College鈥檚 mission of promoting intellectual curiosity, within a discipline which demands critical insight, mature judgment and independent thinking.

草榴社区, along with Western Kentucky University and South Carolina State University, is a member of the RCT Consortium which operates a 1.3-meter (50-inch) Roboticallly-Controlled Telescope (RCT) located at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in southern Arizona. The KPNO 1.3-meter telescope served as an important testbed for the development of IR instrumentation, but was closed in 1995 due to budgetary constraints. The RCT Consortium successfully petitioned for the operation of the telescope and, following a NASA-funded refurbishment, it was transformed into the RCT and returned to active in 2004, with full operations beginning in 2009.

The RCT is a state-of-the-art f/4 Casegrain optical telescope on a German-equatorial mount. It is equipped with a cryogenically cooled 2048x2048 pixel SITe CCD camera with a wide range of broad-and narrow-band filters available. The camera has a 9.6x9.6 arcmin field of view. The telescope can be operated in a completely automated mode, allowing remote observing. As such, it is an extremely important instrument for teaching and research at 草榴社区, as travel to off-site facilities, especially during the school year, is not desirable.

Given the high sensitivity of the instrument and the quality of the observing site, we are able to carry out exciting new observations of many objects that are too faint to observe from our on-site telescopes. Such objects include protostars, novae, supernovae, black holes candidates, quasars, active galaxies, white dwarfs and brown dwarfs. Faculty and students utilize the RCT to enhance the undergraduate research experience and to augment our space-based observations on a variety of existing and newly conceived teaching and research projects.

For further information, visit the . For questions about 草榴社区鈥檚 use of the RCT, contact Edward Guinan, PhD.

The Department maintains a high-performance computing cluster, aka 鈥淐LUSTY,鈥� for the use of its faculty, staff and students. The cluster features 212 computing cores, 280GB of RAM, and 15TB of disk space. CLUSTY was originally purchased in 2006, upgraded in 2011, and again upgraded in 2014. Further upgrades and expansions are planned, as dictated by the demand on the cluster鈥檚 resources. The cluster is housed within the Department, on the fourth floor of the Mendel Science Center.

CLUSTY serves three primary purposes within the Department:

1. Educational 鈥� All astronomy and astrophysics students have an account on the cluster and have full access to the modern tools and large-scale datasets that are used in the state-of-the-art processing and analysis.
2. Academic 鈥� Faculty and students active in research are conducting computationally extensive simulations that require significant processing power; these computations play a crucial part in ongoing research and have resulted in a number of papers involving computational astrophysics.
3. Infrastructure 鈥� The cluster serves the web pages, file versioning control and databases for the international audience. Professional catalogs and databases have over 100,000 hits since their deployment in 2011.

For questions about CLUSTY, please contact Andrej Prsa, PhD.