Duke Teaching Observatory

Mission

Founded in 2002, the facility is designed with two missions:

• Enhance Astronomy instruction at Duke by providing hands-on observation experiences and opportunities for small-scale research projects to students.
• Serve as a platform for outreach activities, helping to enhance science education in local schools by providing opportunities to experience astronomical observations and to meet with Duke faculty and students in an informal learning situation.

Open House Schedule: Fall 2024

We will be spending time outdoors in the woods; the clearing from which we observe can be overgrown and/or muddy, and you may be exposed to ticks or mosquitos.  It will be dark, and you may need to walk over uneven ground.  In the winter it is often cooler in our hollow than in town, in the summer the dew can make it wetter.  Please dress appropriately.  By attending Duke Observatory events, you acknowledge that you are fully aware of the risks and hazards associated with participation in these activities and you voluntarily assume full responsibility and liability for any risk.

On or Not:

Open House for 10/26 is TBD   Note that times have been shifted.   The bright comet will be setting, and the Moon rising, by around 7:30pm.  We will set up on the Eastern edge of the field to get better views of the Western sky near the horizon where the comet will be.   If it's too bright to see the comet early on, we may be able to observe pretty Venus instead.

Dark Sky Clock (by A. Danko using data from the Canadian Meteorological Center). Click on the image above for more detail.

Facility

The observatory currently operates five Meade LX200 GPS Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes. For details on the telescopes, check out the user manual or the assembly instructions. Housed in a shed on-site they are assembled for each session. Nine piers, with power outlets, have been installed to encourage visiting observers to set up their own equipment. Located in the Duke Forest, the observatory is operated and maintained by the Duke Physics Department as part of our overall educational outreach effort.

Activities

The observatory is regularly used by students in Physics 134, the undergraduate introductory course in astronomy at Duke. To the extent possible, it is open on roughly alternate weekends for free public viewing. Check the schedule at top of page to see when these are available. The site is also used by the Stargazing Devils, a Duke student group and occasionally by CHAOS, the Chapel Hill Astronomical and Observational Society.  School groups or other community organizations are invited to arrange scheduled visits at other times.

Contact Us

To schedule a visit to the observatory contact Yuriy Bomze yuriy.bomze@duke.edu or Ronen Plesser plesser@cgtp.duke.edu

Directions

The observatory is located in the Duke Forest, on Cornwallis Rd, about one mile west of Kerley. Driving west on Cornwallis, access is through a Duke Forest gate on the left hand side of the road. (The gate is usually locked unless observatory is open). The gravel road through the gate forks soon. Follow the road to the right around a large shed and park in front of the shed. Turn off car headlights as soon as you have stopped! Walk down the hill to your left (away from Cornwallis) to the observatory site, about 150ft. A radio tower with a flashing red light, also to the left of the road, is just west of our site. If you get to the radio tower, you have gone too far.  Click here for a map.

What Can We See?

With our telescopes, we can make out details of the Moon's surface (central peaks of craters, for example); we can see four of Jupiter's moons and clearly make out the Cassini gap in Saturn's rings; we can make out some asteroids; we can see the glowing gases of the Orion nebula or the ring nebula; we can see several galaxies and many beautiful star clusters. We cannot, for example, see the spiral structure of Andromeda. We can make out the colors of stars, especially when looking at differently-colored members of a binary pair, but for the most part objects appear too faint for our eyes to register color well.