Guilford College Cline Observatory

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!

Follow this link to donate:

Join me and help make an impact at Guilford College

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.

04/08/2024

Thanks to all who came!!!

04/08/2024

The forecast is looking relatively optimistic for this afternoon. The clear sky clock is forecasting clear, Weather Underground says about 30% cloud cover. I'll take those odds!

You might find this of interest: here's an animated GIF my student made a couple weeks ago of Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks. The images are aligned on the comet, so you can see the background stars drift by as the comet moves. Each frame is a 30 s exposure, and the total time interval of the animation is about 45 minutes.

02/21/2024

It’s a hazy night on the roof… but there’s a moon ring!

02/16/2024

I had a nice class last night, teaching students how to take images through three different kinds of telescopes. Here is an image I got of the Moon by holding my phone up to an eyepiece. Also, while I am here, it looks like our next public open house will be Friday, March 15. I will post an official announcement as soon as I can.