The Moon

Taken March 31, 2009. Image credit: Jessica Sircar, BSU graduate.

 

Taken March 31, 2009. Image credit: Jessica Sircar, BSU graduate.

 

Taken through the 12" Meade with a film camera. Image credit: Jessica Sircar, BSU graduate.

 

Image credit: Ron Reynolds, Visiting Lecturer in Physics at BSU.

 

Taken during the total lunar eclipse in February 2008. Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Planets

Saturn with its largest moon Titan, visible as a red spot below Saturn. Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system (the largest is Jupiter's Ganymede), and the only known moon with a thick atmosphere. The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Titan is twice that of Earth! Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Another view of Saturn, taken on APril 8, 2008. Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Jupiter, taken on APril 8, 2008. Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Other views of Jupiter taken on APril 8, 2008. The lefthand image has been magnified. The image on the right has been color-enhanced to bring out the clouds' colors. Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Deep Sky Objects

The Orion Nebula, also known as Messier 42. This is a star-forming nebula: a place where stars like our Sun are being born right now. The brightest stars you see at the center of the nebula are part of the brightest, hottest, and most massive class of stars: the O-type stars. These stars burn their fuel so fast that they are likely to have exhausted their fuel within the next few million years. Image credit: Ron Reynolds, Visiting Lecturer in Physics at BSU.

 

Another view of the Orion Nebula. The colors differ from the previous image because a different camera was used to take this one: a Meade DSI CCD camera. Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Messier 51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. Image credit: Ross Rossetti, BSU graduate.

 

Messier 3 is a globular cluster of stars in our galaxy. These are collections of hundreds of thousands of stars that swarm the Milky Way like bees. Image credit: Jamie Kern, Observatory Manager.

 

Messier 13 is another globular cluster. This one is large and near enough to Earth that it can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation Hercules. Image credit: Jamie Kern, Observatory Manager.

 

Messier 94 is a spiral galaxy about 16 million light-years away from our own Milky Way Galaxy. Image credit: Left - Dale Smith, BSU graduate; Right - Jamie Kern, Observatory Manager.

 

The Ring Nebula (Messier 57) is a "planetary nebula": the gaseous remains of a dead low-mass star like the Sun. When these stars near the end of their lives, they start producing so much energy in their cores that they push their outer layers away from themselves - this goes on until the outer layers are so thin we can see right through them! So when you see the Ring Nebula, you are seeing right through a star. You can even see the tiny remnant of the star's core as a white dot in the center of the cloud. This core was once a nuclear fusion reactor, turning light elements like hydrogen and helium into heavier ones like carbon. Now it is just a cinder, still bright because of residual heat. This cinder is called a white dwarf. Image credit: Dale Smith, BSU graduate.