Probably the coolest project you'll do is to use our SBIG color CCD cameras to take a gorgeous picture of some deep sky wonder - a star cluster, a nebula, a comet, a spiral galaxy... I'll help you get it set up, connect the camera to our computer, and you'll take a series of 5-minute exposures while the camera carefully self-guides, tracking the motion of your subject across the sky. Then, on a cloudy night late in the semester you'll use software on the room 705 computers or your own laptop to turn your raw images into a beautiful color picture. You'll then email to me jpg versions of the thumbnail and screen-size images, and then make an 8x10 color print, frame it, add labels, and submit it for me. Make another one and frame it for your wall - a memento of our time together! Maybe you'll get hooked on astrophotography and join us for my Astro 9 series of courses in a later semester. Past student projects already adorn the walls of our observatory.
Here are the Astro 8A gallery pages from most of the recent past semesters...
Using the same equipment, I often take my own images so you can see what they're capable of. My own images have the luxury of longer exposure times, typically an hour. Here's my personal gallery page. Others can be found amongst the past events, and on the Astro 9 gallery pages.