We've finished our analysis of the supernova in M101, which has now grown too faint for our telescopes. Our final light curves are shown below. You can read a short report on our work, or a technical paper we wrote together with astronomers at Michigan State University. We submitted our paper to the Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

Thanks to the Kostecke family, the RIT Observatory has a new telescope! It's a 16-inch Dobsonian, which makes it the biggest telescope in our collection. You can see its mirror in the picture below. With the help of RIT students Alex Habermann, Jacob Kupernik and Wilkie Olin-Ammentorp, we put it together, collimated it roughly, and tried it out briefly on the Orion Nebula.

• Astronomy at RIT
• Weather and events
• Clear Sky Clock weather prediction for Rochester
• NOAA weather page for Buffalo/Rochester area Thanks to the NOAA!
• JPL's Space Calendar
• Map to the Observatory
• Facilities
• We are one of the sites in the Center for Backyard Astrophysics
• RIT offers astronomy courses
  • at the undergraduate level, in the Astronomy minor
  • at the graduate level, in the Astrophysical Sciences and Technology Ph.D. program
• Past observing sessions at RIT
  including observations of WZ Sge during summer 2001, V603 Aql during summer 2003, SN 2011fe in the fall of 2011, and educational events, too
• Astronomical Images
• The Astronomy Section of the Rochester Academy of Sciences
  is Rochester's amateur astronomy club, and it's a great one. They meet each month on the RIT Campus, in room A300 of Building 8.
• Other Interesting/Useful Web Sites

Michael Richmond
Department of Physics
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY 14623
(585) 475-2538
mwrsps@rit.edu