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Prof John Martin鈥檚 Article in June 2011 issue of Gemini Focus magazine
(June 2011)
The June 2011 issue of Gemini Focus magazine contains an article written by UIS Assistant Professor John Martin about his use of an infrared camera on the Gemini-South telescope to image the interior of the nebula cocooning the star Eta Carinae.聽
Prof John Martin Earns Grant From National Science Foundation
(July 2011)
On July 1 the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that a collaboration including UIS Assistant Professor John Martin earned a three-year grant for their proposal entitiled 鈥淥n the Road to the Supernova: LBVs, Hypergiants, and SN Impostors.鈥� The project will continue and expand on Martin鈥檚 collarboration with Kris Davison and Roberta Humphreys (both at the University of Minnesota) to study the end stages and instabilities in the most massive stars in the universe.
Prof John Martin Named University Scholar
(October 2011)
. The University Scholar program honors the top scholars at the University of 缅北禁地 and is the top award for scholarship on the Springfield Campus.
First Light on New CCD Camera
(March 2012)
Transit of Venus Star Party on June 5, 2012
We will be hosting a special day-time star party at Southwind Park from 5pm to sunset in Springfield, IL to view the rare Transit of Venus event on Tuesday, June 5, 2012.聽聽
Pictures of the Moon
On May 30 we took a series of pictures of the Moon with our wide-field CCD camera on our 20-inch telescope. Below is the image we produced.
Supernova Impostors
罢丑别听聽has taken advantage of the clear weather patterns and our new wide-field U42 camera to follow the brightness variations of suspected聽聽in distant galaxies.
The Eagle Nebula (M16)
The cloudy weather lately has been bad news for聽Friday Night Star Parties聽but it has given us some time to reduce a back-log of pretty pictures the聽聽took over the summer. Below is an image of the聽.
The Wild Duck Cluster (M11)
This open star cluster in the Milky Way is well known to amateur astronomers as a particularly rich and colorful cluster. The colors reveal the temperatures of the stars, with blue stars being hotter and red stars being cooler. Below is an image produced from a series of exposures taken by the 20-inch telescope at the UIS Barber Observatory on June 11, 2013. This cluster contains about 2900 stars and has an estimated age of 220 million years (very young when we consider our own Sun is at least 4 billion years old).
Supernova 2013df in NGC 4414
The spiral galaxy to the left of center in this picture is聽. 聽It is about 62 million lightyears away from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. 聽On June 8th astronomers in Italy noted a new bright star in the galaxy just to the left of the center in this image. 聽A spectrum obtained by the Keck II telescope in Hawaii two days later confirmed this was a star many times the mass of the Sun that had exploded as a supernova.