Graduate Student Savanah Turner Publishes Study of over 300 L and T dwarfs

BYU Astronomy Research Group Joins the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC)

As of January 2021 BYU will be a member of the ARC Consortium (Link to Consortium) with access to the ARC 3.5-m telescope and the 0.5-m ARCSAT telescope.  The primary use of the ARC 3.5-m telescope time is for graduate student projects.  This provides a wide array of instrumentation that is currently being used to study objects in the solar system all the way to studies of the large scale structure of the Universe.

Other BYU Astronomy Facilities

In addition to our telescope time from the ARC consortium, we operate a number of our own astronomical facilities

West Mountain Observatory (West Mountain)

This is our mountain observatory at about 6600 ft above sea level.  This consists of three telescopes: 0.9-m, 0.5-m, and a 0.32-m. It is a 40 minute drive that ends in a 5 miles drive up a dirt road. The mountain itself can be seen from campus. We don't provide any tours of this facility.

Orson Pratt Observatory

The Orson Pratt Observatory is named for an early apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  It is our campus telescope facility and contains a wide variety of telescopes for student research and public outreach. We operate a 24" PlaneWave telescope in the main campus dome, plus a 16", two 12", one 8", and a 6" telescope on our observation deck.  The telescopes are all fully robotic. Beyond this we have a large sections of telescopes used on public nights.

Royden G. Derrick Planetarium (Planetarium)

This is a 119 seat, 39" dome planetarium with acoustically treated walls to allow it's use as a lecture room. Recently we upgraded to an E&S Digistar7 operating system with 4K projectors.  The planetarium is used for teaching classes, public outreach, and astronomy education research projects.





Selected Publications

Thumbnail of figure from publication
Time-series ensemble photometry of SX phoenicis stars .1. BL Camelopardalis
Eric G. Hintz, Michael D. Joner, D. Harold McNamara, Kenneth A. Nelson, J. Ward Moody, and Chulhee Kim

We present an analysis of the multiperiodic SX Phoenicis star BL Camelopardalis (GD 428). Along with 24 times of maximum light from archival data, six previously unpublished times of maximum light from photomultiplier observations and 39 new CCD observations of maximum light are reported. The new CCD observations indicate that BL Cam is a double-mode variable with a primary period of 0.0391 day, a secondary period of 0.0306 day, and a pi(1)/pi(0) ratio of 0.783. The relation between metallicity and period ratio for large-amplitude delta Scuti variables is examined in detail. Finally, evidence is presented that the fundamental period pi(0) has increased by 0.009 s in the last 20 years.

Thumbnail of figure from publication
Evidence for mass outflow from the nucleus of M101: Knots, rings, and a geyser
J. Ward Moody, Peter W. A. Roming, Michael D. Joner, and Eric G. Hintz (et al.)
H alpha on-line and off-line CCD images of M101 obtained with the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.6 m telescope show the presence of two H alpha bright, filled knots paired Linearly across the nucleus in a north-south orientation. The knots are centered 2.4 '' (85 pc, assuming a distance to M101 of 7.4 Mpc) from the nucleus and lie roughly perpendicular to an east-west molecular bar. Each knot in turn is connected to an elongated, photoionized ring lying parallel along the bar. The eastern ring, connected to the southern knot, reaches outward in a well-defined 500X200 pc oval. The 700X300 pc western ring, connected to the northern knot, is more broken and dissipated in the middle. An arc containing blue stars and/or significant H alpha absorption lies along the southern side of a dust lane extending from the nucleus westward along the bar. Hubble Space Telescope Planetary Camera image data show pockets of star-forming regions to the east and to the south of the nucleus which are associated with the knot and ring in that half. The imaging data, together with velocity data obtained with the Coude' feed spectrometer at Kitt Peak National Observatory show that the knots and rings are likely a bipolar outflow originating from a velocity <100 km s(-1) ''geyser'' which has a period of approximately 22 million years and is located in the nucleus. The geyser may be caused by a mass <10(6) M(.) black hole orbiting within the nucleus, sweeping material from the molecular bar. (C) 1995 American Astronomical Society.
Thumbnail of figure from publication
BVRI CCD Photometry of Galaxies in Abell Clusters: Hubble Types from Undersampled Data
Thumbnail of figure from publication
The Search for Stellar Variability in M67: Ensemble Photometry with the Burrell Schmidt Telescope
M. D. Joner, E. G. Hintz, T. E. Stephens, K. A. Nelson, and J. W. Moody (et al.)
Thumbnail of figure from publication
Supernova 1993J in NGC 3031
Thumbnail of figure from publication
Departures from standard disc predictions in intensive ground-based monitoring of three AGNs
M D Joner, M Hallum, J Kruger, and M Spencer (et al.)

We present ground-based multiband light curves of the AGN Mrk 509, NGC 4151, and NGC 4593 obtained contemporaneously with Swift monitoring. We measure cross-correlation lags relative to Swift UVW2 (1928 Å) and test the standard prediction for disc reprocessing, which assumes a geometrically thin optically thick accretion disc where continuum interband delays follow the relation ⁠. For Mrk 509 the 273-d Swift campaign gives well-defined lags that increase with wavelength as ⁠, steeper than the thin-disc prediction, and the optical lags are a factor of  longer than expected for a simple disc-reprocessing model. This ‘disc-size discrepancy’ as well as excess lags in the u and r bands (which include the Balmer continuum and H ⁠, respectively) suggest a mix of short lags from the disc and longer lags from nebular continuum originating in the broad-line region. The shorter Swift campaigns, 69 d on NGC 4151 and 22 d on NGC 4593, yield less well-defined shorter lags  d. The NGC 4593 lags are consistent with  but with uncertainties too large for a strong test. For NGC 4151 the Swift lags match ⁠, with a small U-band excess, but the ground-based lags in the r, i, and z bands are significantly shorter than the B and g lags, and also shorter than expected from the thin-disc prediction. The interpretation of this unusual lag spectrum is unclear. Overall these results indicate significant diversity in the  relation across the optical/UV/NIR, which differs from the more homogeneous behaviour seen in the Swift bands.