Ball State Department of Astronomy Observatory

From 1996 to 1998, I spent my time working towards my Masters degree where I specialized in astronomy. As a benefit, I was given keys to the Ball State University Observatory. While there, a fellow student, Ben Cristoffel, and I stayed up late one night trying to see how many deep sky objects we could find. The instrumentation included a Star-I thermocouple-cooled CCD camera and a Celstron 14" SCT telescope. None of the images are flat-fielded so dirt and dust in the light path is still evident. Also, the exposure's were kept short so that we could quickly move on to another object. Unfortunately, I lost the original digital data so I had to rescan these images from laser-printer hardcopies. All of these factors resulted in the less than spectacular results below. However, they show that I have been there and done that. -Enjoy!

NOTE: Click on thumbnail images to see larger version.

M1 (Crab Nebula)	M100 (Spiral Galaxy)	M108 (Dusty High-Inclination Spiral Galaxy w/ No Central Bulge)
M15 (Globular Star Cluster)	M42 (Orion Nebula)	M51 (Spiral Galaxy)
M74 (Spiral Galaxy)	M77 (Seyfert Galaxy)	M81 (Spiral Galaxy)
M82 (Irregular Galaxy)	M98 (Edge-on Spiral Galaxy)	M99 (Spiral Galaxy)
NGC 2403 (Spiral Galaxy with Halo)	NGC 2683 (Nearly Edge-on Spiral Galaxy)	NGC 2841 (Tight Spiral Galaxy)
NGC 2903 (Barred-Spiral Galaxy)	NGC 3184 (Spiral Galaxy)	NGC 3628 (Galaxy)
NGC 4302 & 4298 (Galaxy Pair)	NGC 6946 (Spiral Galaxy)	NGC 7640 (Highly-Inclined Galaxy)