The UCI Astronomy Club and the UCI Telescope
Tammy Smecker-Hane
In June, students from our P20A Introduction to
Astronomy course formed the
UCI Astronomy Club and appointed
Joelle Smith, currently a sophomore, as its president.
I am the club's faculty sponsor. These students
are overflowing with enthusiasm! They have met four times this
summer to use UCI's 24-inch telescope to explore the heavens (see
the photo above). They have learned how to use the computer-controlled
telescope, which was no small feat since we have been doing repairs on the
telescope mirror mount which often lead to misalignments on the sky.
They have mastered the skill of realigning the telescope on
a bright star before moving on to more interesting objects.
While our CCD camera has been down for repairs, the club has
been using the eyepiece to view celestial objects
(astronomy the old fashioned way). They have seen
Jupiter and four of its moons, Saturn and its rings,
globular clusters, planetary nebulae, and galaxies.
The students can hardly wait to have the CCD camera back so
that they can record these objects and study them in more detail.
If you are interesting in joining the group please email Joelle Smith
-- smithja@uci.edu.
Last summer's effort to align the polar axis of the telescope on the
sky was very successful, and we can slew across the sky with much
better accuracy. This summer, we have improved the telescope hardware
and software. Jim Kelley designed new supports for the primary mirror
that greatly reduce flexure. We purchased a more powerful PC that
serves as our data acquisition and analysis computer. Anthony Shoup
developed a new Windows-based user-friendly computer program that
controls the telescope. Its other big advantage is that we can tailor
the telescope interface to our needs. For example, we added the
ability to control the telescope from ``The Sky'', a commercial
software program that graphically illustrates the celestial sphere.
Soon we will have the ability to control the dome and instrument
selector, too. These efforts make for a more user-friendly telescope
that is becoming a valuable tool for teaching our introductory
astronomy courses. As soon as we have guiding capabilities, we can
incorporate projects using the CCD camera into our undergraduate
advanced laboratory course.
Tammy Smecker-Hane,
tsmecker@uci.edu