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See Images Taken with our Equipment

Come to a Public Viewing Night

Visit the Sky Survey Page for details on our equipment

The Wheaton College Observatory is home to:

7 Meade LX200 12" telescopes
1 Celestron C-14 14" telescopes
1 GT1100 mount and 16" LX200 telescope
1 Centurion 18" telescope, imaging only
1 Tectron Dobsonian 20" telescope, viewing only
1 Archimage satellite-tracking telescope, with 1 12" and 1 8" tube
7 SBIG ST8E CCD Cameras with Color Filter Wheel and Adaptive Optics
1 SBIG Spectrometer
1 Astrovid video imaging camera
1 SBIG STV CCD Camera
2 H-Alpha Solar Filters
1 Starlab Planetarium.

Over 2,000 undergraduate students have had hands-on experience using these telescopes in our astronomy courses. The Observatory is also open to the public on clear Friday nights, and several thousand visitors have looked through the telescopes in recent years.

Although the main purpose of the observatory is educational, we believe that having multiple telescopes equipped with CCD cameras also gives us unique research capabilities. We plan to do automated survey work on projects including simultaneous UBVRI asteroid photometry, mosaic survey work for supernovae in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, and rapid follow-up of gamma ray burster reports. We are very interested in collaborating with others on these and similar projects.

Several Wheaton students and graduates have been crucial to the development of the Wheaton College Observatory: Spencer Zawasky '93, Scott Hesser '01, Former Departmental Assistant Lori Agan '98, former Departmental Assistant Deb Banks '92, James Eberhart '03, Department Assistant Jon McBee '04, Jon Burkle '04 and Abbigail Sewall '06.

We are grateful for support from the National Science Foundation ILI Program, the American Astronomical Society Small Research Grant Program, and the Bojan Hamlin Jennings faculty chair which allowed us to purchase our latest additional telescope, the Centurion.

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Last update 05/03 by Lori Agan