Guilford College Cline Observatory

10/11/2026

Good morning! I am delighted to announce that we will be staging a performance of Lauren Gunderson's Silent Sky, in conjunction with the theater department. For two weekends in November, our planetarium in the Bryan Jr. auditorium will be transformed into a theater! I'm going to be wiring up a temporary lighting grid next week, and of course we plan to have projected images up on the dome to enhance and support the performances going on below. The play is about Henrietta Leavitt and her work with other "Harvard Computers" (back then a computer was a person who did computations as their job, not a machine) such as Annie Jump Cannon and Wilhelmina Fleming. Our last two public open house nights were celebrations of these women and what they discovered about the universe, and now we're going to host a play about them! We're also working in collaboration with the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (www.pari.edu) to have a display of real glass plate celestial images on display in the lobby, so you can see what Henrietta and the others would have been working with. The performances will be over two weekends in November, as shown in the poster below. Tickets are available only at the door, and it is general seating. I hope you can come!

09/16/2026

I heard about a supernova happening right now, so I thought I would try to take a photo of it. And here it is! On the right is my image from last night, 75 minutes of exposure. On the left is an archival image. The SN is clearly visible in mine and not in the other (I added the arrow just in case). This galaxy is about 40 million light years away. Most of the dots all around it are stars that are in our galaxy that just happen to be in the same direction. They are more like 100 light years away. So that dot the arrow is pointing to looks as bright as things that are 100,000 times closer. Which means it's ten billion times brighter. That hazy glow around it? That's what billions of stars look like that far away. And that dot is a single star, outshining them all as it explodes. The universe is an amazing place!

08/03/2026

We are gearing up for the Fall semester, and I think this will be the most exciting semester in our observatory's history. We have tentatively scheduled two public open houses for Sept 5th and Oct 3rd, and in November, we will be collaborating with the Guilford College Theater Department to stage a production (in the planetarium!) of Lauren Gunderson's play Silent Sky! (https://www.laurengunderson.com/all-plays/silent-sky) The play is a dramatization of the life of Henrietta Leavitt, the Harvard astronomer and "computer" who discovered the relationship between how fast certain stars pulse and how bright they are. Her work was the foundation for figuring out how big the universe is, and led to the development of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins. The play also features Annie Jump Cannon, who developed the system of classifying stars that we use today. Our September and October open house planetarium presentations will highlight the science and discoveries of these women, to prepare for the dramatization of their lives to come in November. As usual, if weather permits, we will follow the presentations with rooftop observing at the Cline Observatory. I am also hoping that we can invite audience and cast from the Silent Sky performances to the roof after each show, but those ideas are still in development. The dates of the performance will be Nov 5-14, Thursday-Saturday. I will post more about all these things as the dates get closer and the details get settled, but I wanted to let you know what was coming, because I'm so excited about it!

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03/01/2026

Thanks to all who came last night. As I feared, Mercury, Venus, and Neptune were all too close to the Sun to see, but we watched Saturn, Jupiter, the Moon, and even Uranus. I didn't get any images of Jupiter, but Io went behind the planet while we were watching it! Here are images of Saturn (you can see the rings in front of the planet!) and Uranus (with two moons and a photobombing human satellite). Please message me if you'd like to get added to our email list for announcements about future events (they'll also be posted here, of course). Hope to see you next time!

11/14/2025

The other night we had a bunch of students up on the roof, learning how to use telescopes and enjoying the views (no aurorae, unfortunately). One student took a few dozen images of comet C/2025 R2 Swan over the span of about a half hour, and made this animated GIF of it moving against the background stars. I always find it thrilling to see things moving in the sky in real time!

04/29/2025

I had a nice night on the roof with a student. We got the camera back on and aligned, we worked out a focus model for each filter, and we got the autoguiding working again (we had taken the camera off to let people look through the 16-inch telescope for the planetary alignment open houses earlier in the year). Next step is to make a new set of darks and flats! There was a beautiful crescent Moon, so I snapped a few images and then stiched them together later. Usually the Moon is too bright for the 16-inch telescope, but there was so little of it being illuminated that we could get away with it. I also got a nice image of M101 -- the Pinwheel Galaxy. It will look better once we get the darks and flats ready.

04/08/2025

Good morning,

We are gearing up to announce our next observatory open house event, in late April, which will feature a guest speaker! Chris Rowe from the Greensboro Astronomy Club will present on Black Holes: The Weirdest Places in the Universe.

Before we announce the details, though, I want to ask for your help. We at Guilford College have never charged admission to our open houses, and we never will, but the college is going through a financial crisis right now, and funds are tight. If you value the experience of our presentations, and you appreciate being able to look through telescopes on the roof, I hope you will consider making a donation to the College. General donations to the "Loyalty Fund" will help the college survive, and if you would like to support the Observatory specifically (I do have broken equipment that would be really great to repair or replace!), you can also donate to the Physics Department specifically. Thank you for considering it, and whether you can support financially or not, we appreciate your being a part of our events, and we hope to see you in a few weeks!

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01/14/2025

Two announcements: I just posted about our next open house, and I also wanted to share a neat set of images of the Moon moving away from Mars last night about 10:30 pm. If the weather allows, we should be able to see many planets on January 25th -- I hope you can come!

08/25/2024

The Fall semester has begun. Students are back, classes are underway, the nights are getting longer... and we are planning for the Fall observatory open houses! The first one will be Sept 21, Prof Thom Espinola will host a presentation about solar activity, space weather, and aurorae. I will make an event announcement in the next few days. Prof Don Smith will do a presentation in October, and Prof Terry Rolfe will do one in November. Specific dates and topics to be determined.

I didn't get as much done over the summer as I hoped to, but I did get the autoguiding working on the big telescope, so I can do long exposures now! Here's a 600 s image of the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), a star that underwent a "slow explosion" about 14,000 years ago, and has been drifting apart ever since.

04/09/2024

We made the front page of the News & Record! I'm not sure if the article will share. I'll get a picture of it later, if it doesn't. Thanks again to everyone for coming out and being a part of it!

"It's so cool; it's so strange," said Guilford College freshman Frankie McClernon.