College of Arts and Sciences

The day of Monday August 21 will feature a real treat -- a solar eclipse visible (weather permitting!) across the United States. While Cleveland won't be in the path of the total eclipse this time, we will see a partial eclipse where the Moon will cover up to 80% of the Sun's face at maximum eclipse, so it should still be a fun sight to see! The timing of the eclipse varies depending on where in the country you are viewing it, but here in Cleveland, the eclipse begins at 1:06pm, when the Moon will start to carve a "notch"...

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Red giant stars are the most luminous ones found in a population of old stars, and so are particularly useful to study the early history of the Milky Way. "We use these stars like fossils, because in many cases their chemistry and motions have been unchanged since they were formed more than 10 Gyr ago", says CWRU astronomer Heather Morrison. She and her collaborators have spent more than a decade identifying these rare red giants as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's SEGUE project, and have found over 5,000 giant stars, some of them as far away as...

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This fall marks the full public release of CWRU Astronomy's Burrell Schmidt Deep Virgo Survey. Over the course of seven observing seasons from 2004 through 2011, CWRU astronomer Chris Mihos and collaborators used the Burrell Schmidt telescope to conduct deep wide-field imaging of the nearby Virgo Cluster of galaxies. The survey covers over 15 square degrees of the cluster in two filters, providing surface photometry and color information for galaxies, tidal streams, and diffuse light in Virgo down to extremely low surface brightnesses (μB ~ 29.5 mag/arcsec2, or about 1/100 of the brightness of the dark night sky). The...

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Every year CWRU Astronomy holds a Halloween pumpkin carving event for faculty, staff, and students. This year added an extra treat -- a campus-wide power outage in the middle of the carving! There's nothing like a pack of CWRU Astro students running circles around their professors in the dark while holding sharp knives.... Check out pictures of the event on our CWRU Astronomy facebook page!

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