Back in spring this year I started volunteering for the Harvard Observing Project (HOP). Each semester, HOP chooses a target to observe with the Clay Telescope in order to publish new data as part of a scientific article. The data are* analyzed by graduate or undergraduate students at the end of the semester and there are usually 7-10 HOP volunteers to help collect the data.
*a physics professor once told me that "data" is a plural term.
Another great part of HOP is that we have our sessions open to other students at Harvard and any guests they want to bring. This means we'll look at 3-5 different celestial objects over a night, including the special science targets. Here is a picture of the Clay Telescope in its dome:
I know it appears like we were just pointing the telescope at some clouds. We were. The hope was that the clouds would pass so that we could observe our science target for the fall semester: KIC 8462852. That's not a toll-free phone number, but a naming scheme devised for the Kepler Space Telescope. KIC is an acronym for the Kepler Input Catalog and the number following it distinguishes between stars put into the catalog. This star became more popular than your typical KIC object when astronomers noticed something weird happening to the light from the star. Long story short, some people believe the star hosts an alien megastructure. This "explains" what's happening to the light from the star as we see it from Earth, but there are certainly more viable theories like there being an excessive amount of rocky or dusty debris orbiting the star. This is always a fun story to tell our visitors to the Clay during our HOP nights.
On clearer nights, we've gotten pictures of other things like the Andromeda Galaxy, Ring Nebula, and the Moon:
This picture was made using 3 separate images taken in red, green, and blue filters. The filters only let in one color of light and each image is then assigned a color (scaled from 0 to 255 with RGB sliders).
Andromeda is in the top right corner of this image. I'm not really sure why we chose it to be there. Maybe it was a late-night attempt to make an aesthetic statement. Or maybe it was because it was late at night and we didn't want to center the telescope. Hmm.
A close up of the moon. The moon is so bright that this image was taken with a 0.1 second exposure. We also used the ultraviolet light filter to only allow UV light in since the moon does not shine as brightly in that light as it does in other colors. I eventually had this printed onto a mousepad.
All of these are taken with the Clay Telescope's CCD. It is the small box with the four silver X's in the picture. The CCD is 1024 by 1024 pixels and does a pretty great job at finding faint celestial objects considering our proximity to Boston and all of the city light.
I'm excited to see what new target we'll be looking at in the Spring.
:^)