Photo courtesy The Banff Centre

What people are saying about the King’s Observatory…

It may not be big but it is

small!

A Brief History …

A Brief History …• Built in 1993 from completely recycled materials!• Split roof design with attached warm-room• Fully networked and web accessible• Used an average of 80 nights per year• To date over 9 thousand “observation-hours”• Has undergone 3 generations of telescopes/detectors

– 0.20 m Newtonian– 0.30 m Newtonian– 0.36 m Schmidt-Cassegrain

• Equipped for high precision photometry, spectroscopy and narrow-band imagery as well as auroral, geomagnetic studies and all-sky meteor camera

• Collaborated in more than 30 professional publications in refereed journals

Student Research…

• How old are the stars?– Colour-magnitude diagram M37

• The Dangers of gaining mass!– Nova Cass 1993 – Supernova 2004ET

• Things That Go Bump in the Night– BY Cam, DL Pegasi and AE Uma

• Way Out There!– Red shift of 3C 273

How old are the stars?

•Rob Haasdyk – senior thesis project 1992

•Tyler Foster

Published in Sky & Telescope magazine, May 1993.

The Dangers of gaining mass!• Nova Cassiopeia 1993

– Kerry Kejiwski (UofA)– Tyler Foster (Kings)

More Dangers of gaining mass!• Supernova 2004ET

– Sam Zondervan, Senior Thesis project 2005

Things That Go Bump in the Night

• Photometry on SX Phoenicis Stars by– Shane Strydhorst (AE-UMa – Senior Thesis project 1996, poster presented at

Canadian Astronomical Society Annual General Meeting, June 1996 – acknowledged in Time-Series Ensemble Photometry of SX Phoenicis Stars. II. AE Ursae Majoris.Hintz, E.; Hintz, Maureen L.; Joner, Michael

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, v.109, p.1073-1076)

– Nathan Wielenga (BL Cam – Astro 300, Fall 2009)

Way Out There!• Measuring the redshift of Quasar 3C 273

Matt Glenn, senior thesis project, spring 2011

Redshift z = 0.16 indicating recessional velocity of 45 000 km/s and distance 2.4 billion light years!

Community Service…

• School groups, cub scouts etc• King’s Astropic of the Week

H

OIII

SII

L

The Crab Nebula

Astronomy Labs (Non-science majors) …

Astronomy Labs (Non-science majors) …

Lunar Craters and Impact in the Solar

System

The Jovian System and Rotational Flattening

Basic Research…

• Active collaboration with many professional and advanced amateurs world-wide– CBA: Joseph Patterson, Columbia– VSNET: Taichi Kato, Kyoto University

• Primary research areas:• cataclysmic variable stars• SX-Phoenicis and Dwarf Cephied Stars

Some Sample Pubs…

Future Directions?

Thank you any questions?