Stars, galaxies and little green men

Well, so I didn't exactly find any little green men, but I did see a lot of stars, several galaxies and I almost saw a near-earth-asteroid (more on that later).

In case you didn't know what you were getting into, this is the web-page for my Special Project (Astro 356), Junior year, Fall 2000, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA, Earth, Sol system (for those of you far-far from here, that's a type-G star on the edge of a spiral arm about 16000 light-years from the center of our Galaxy: The Milky Way as we like to call it).

I took this course with the intention of learning more about how to take and process CCD images with CCDOPS and the 16bit SBIG ST-6 cameras that we have here at Carleton, start becoming very comfortable with the telescopes (8" Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain LX-200's at f/6.3 and f/10) and having lots of fun. I'd like to say that I accomplished all of those goals (I certainly had fun and I do feel much more comfortable with the equipment).

All of this started when I took Astro-113 during spring term last year (2000, my sophomore year) with Joel Weisberg. I really enjoyed that class and it renewed the interest in astronomy that I had had years before, but which had waned over the years, because I could not actively pursue it. But when I took Astro-113, I decided that I desperately wanted to start doing astronomy again, and so I decided to do a special project this term with Cindy Blaha.

So anyway, here you are at this web-page summarizing what I did and showing off some of the pretty pictures that I took.

Here are some of the things that I looked at and looked for for this project:

And finally, the culmination of this project, my search for the fast-mover (near-earth-asteroid) 2000 UG11 which was discovered on 25 October 2000 by Lincoln Laboratory's 1.0-meter LINEAR robotic telescope in New Mexico, operated by M. Blythe, F. Shelly, and colleagues. The orbital elements were quickly released, prompting me to attempt to find it -- it was supposed to reach about 14th magnitude around 6 November, well within the range of the CCD/telescope combination that I was using. The entire story of my attempt at finding this object is given here:

2000 UG11 Story