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
We have compared the Hyades, Coma, and a set of field standard stars in the V and Stromgren-beta systems. If Stromgren data by Crawford and his collaborators are considered, all the data turn out to be on the same system; no corrections as large as several mmag are required to achieve this state. For beta, similar consistency between the Hyades and Coma is already known to exist. We find that for the standard stars, beta values from the literature are consistent with the Hyades-Coma system. For V, we adopt corrections derived previously by Joner and Taylor for published cluster photometry. Given these corrections, we find that within rather generous accidental-error limits, the V systems for the field stars and the clusters agree. With one puzzling exception (namely, b-y for the field stars and the Hyades), recent results published by Stetson agree with ours. Because our result is from direct comparison, we suggest that it should be preferred in this case. However, we also note the need for further comparison between our adopted standard stars and the Gronbech-Olsen stars which Stetson used.
