Ritter Observatory

Image by E. Hesselbach

• Research: long-term monitoring of variable stars that have winds, circumstellar disks, or active envelopes, with occasional forays into spectroscopy of bright solar system objects
• Access by the professional astronomical community, formerly with support by the National Science Foundation Program for Research and Education with Small Telescopes (PREST)
• Instruction
• Public outreach: public observing on the first Friday of every month and on special occasions, offered through Ritter Planetarium and Brooks Observatory. Our introductory poster, located in the 5th floor lobby, is reproduced here (PDF, 128 KB). For the full-sized version (PDF, 6.8 MB), click here.

Information for observers

At the end of December 2006, we received our new Spectral Instruments 600 Series camera, with a 4K X 4K CCD (at right). This camera is now installed and fully operational on the échelle spectrograph. More information is available here. A colorized version of a spectrum of Deneb obtained with the new camera can be viewed here.

• Telescope and instrumentation - page under construction
• Usage: the telescope is used on essentially every spectroscopically usable night by a team that, as of this writing, consists of a graduate student, a postdoc, an undergraduate, a faculty member, and several undergraduate and graduate student trainees.
• Observing schedule with Clear Sky Clock
• Operational status as of June 8, 2010: An 850 Series CCD camera with a 2k X 512 CCD for the Low-Dispersion Spectrograph from Spectral Instruments (Tucson, AZ) hasa been purchased with the last remaining funds from our NSF-PREST grant, which expired on August 31, 2009. The new camera has a water-assisted thermoelectric cooling system. Preliminary testing is complete, the camera is in full operation, and requests for service observations are welcome.

  The échelle spectrograph continues in good operational status.

Spectra Data reduction Index to archival data taken before April 2007 On-line, public archive of reduced data List of publications, reports, theses, and abstracts Staff Director: Jon Bjorkman Graduate Research Assistant: James Davidson Observatory Technician: Mike Brown Document custodian: Nancy Morrison, who retired as director effective June 1, 2010. Page last updated: March 4, 2013