First Light on New CCD Camera

(March 2012)

Transit of Venus Star Party on June 5, 2012

We will be hosting a special day-time star party at Southwind Park from 5pm to sunset in Springfield, IL to view the rare Transit of Venus event on Tuesday, June 5, 2012.  

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Pictures of the Moon

On May 30 we took a series of pictures of the Moon with our wide-field CCD camera on our 20-inch telescope. Below is the image we produced.

Supernova Impostors

The UIS Barber Observatory has taken advantage of the clear weather patterns and our new wide-field U42 camera to follow the brightness variations of suspected supernova impostors in distant galaxies.

The Eagle Nebula (M16)

The cloudy weather lately has been bad news for Friday Night Star Parties but it has given us some time to reduce a back-log of pretty pictures the UIS Barber Observatory took over the summer. Below is an image of the Eagle Nebula (M16) in the constellation Serpens.

The Wild Duck Cluster (M11)

This open star cluster in the Milky Way is well known to amateur astronomers as a particularly rich and colorful cluster.  The colors reveal the temperatures of the stars, with blue stars being hotter and red stars being cooler.  Below is an image produced from a series of exposures taken by the 20-inch telescope at the UIS Barber Observatory on June 11, 2013.   This cluster contains about 2900 stars and has an estimated age of 220 million years (very young when we consider our own Sun is at least 4 billion years old).

Supernova 2013df in NGC 4414

The spiral galaxy to the left of center in this picture is NGC 4414.  It is about 62 million lightyears away from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices.  On June 8th astronomers in Italy noted a new bright star in the galaxy just to the left of the center in this image.  A spectrum obtained by the Keck II telescope in Hawaii two days later confirmed this was a star many times the mass of the Sun that had exploded as a supernova.

Perseid Meteor Star Party August 11/12

The University of Illinois Springfield Astronomy-Physics Program is co-hosting a viewing of the Perseid Meteor shower before dawn on Monday, August 12.  

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Nearby Galaxy M33

This is a composite image of the galaxy M33 in the constellation Triangulum.  It is a collection of 40 billion stars about 3 million light years away.  M33 is one of three large galaxies in our local group (including also the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milkway Galaxy).