Best Observatory Antioch Near Me

4worldlovers: The Saint Mary's College Geissberger Observatory was created in 2003 under the observant eye of Prof. Ronald P. Olowin (1945-2017) with a generous gift from the Geissberger family in memory of Norma Geissberger. The proposal for the observatory has antecedents in correspondence of Br. Raphael Patton going at least as far back as 1983. Today the observatory is managed by Prof. Aaron Lee.

In spring of 2017, Profs. Hans de Moor and Brian Hill along with senior undergraduates Katherine Damiano and Justin Robinson took the first steps toward using the observatory for differential photometry of variable stars. Thanks to additional gifts in memory of Prof. Olowin, in 2018 an upgrade of virtually all of the astronomy equipment used for both teaching and research was undertaken.

Today, the observatory's 16-inch Meade is outfitted with equipment that can be used to record exoplanet transits. In summer of 2018, rising sophomore Ariana Hofelmann worked with Prof. Hill to upgrade the observatory and get it admitted to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Follow-Up Observing Program (TFOP).

In summer of 2019, rising junior Connor Martin worked with Prof. Hill to do additional major rehabilitation of the observatory equipment ranging from disassembling, cleaning, and collimating the 16-inch Meade to overhauling the observatory weather station.

The work of all four of these undergraduates prepared the observatory for contribution to TFOP. For a brief introduction to TESS and TFOP, see the video produced by Haley Nelson of the College's Communications Office: Summer Research: TESS Follow-Up Observing Program.

Forecasts and Current Conditions for the Saint Mary's College Geissberger Observatory.

The campus and observatory are located in Moraga, California which is east of Oakland and the first range of the East Bay’s coastal hills. These hills delay the arrival of the coastal fog that the Bay Area is well-known for. The dome is at 37° 50' 21.1" N and 122° 6' 8.7" W, and at an elevation of 277 meters.

On the satellite view below, the Geissberger Observatory Pad is at center-right and the Geissberger Observatory Dome is at upper-right. The satellite view is sufficiently detailed to show the constellation of six outdoor piers at the Observatory Pad. Clicking on the satellite view opens Google maps.

The pad is in a slightly protected position and has good horizon except to the east where targets must rise to about 25° to be visible. The dome is situated on the top of a small hill that is far enough from nearby hills so as to be limited principally by airmass in choice of targets rather than any obstruction. The weather station is halfway up the hillside rising from the pad to the dome. Relative to a major city, Moraga is about 16 miles east-northeast of San Francisco. During standard time, local time is UTC-8, and during daylight savings time, local time is UTC-7.

Thanks to the generous gifts mentioned above, the observatory now has four Stellarvue 102T and two Stellarvue 115T apochromatic refractors, and a Questar 7 Maksutov-Cassegrain. These are usually used at the observatory pad or taken to dark-sky sites. The telescope in the dome, a Meade 16-inch (0.4 meter) LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain, will be discussed in the next section.

In the photo above, two members of the Saint Mary's community watch Jupiter rising in the southeast at the beginning of a May, 2018 astronomy night. The Stellarvue 102T they are using is riding on one of the six Losmandy GM8 mounts affixed to a pier in the observatory's constellation of six outdoor piers.

As mentioned above, in the dome is the campus's largest telescope, a 0.4-meter Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain. From a research perspective, the telescope is well-suited to contributing to variable star astronomy, and among the most interesting and new variable star observations are those caused by exoplanet transits. The choices of equipment detailed in this section were made with exoplanet transit observations in mind.