2 Oct. 2025 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the
UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
Although parking for this meeting at the Reuter Center is free, you must register your vehicle with a “Visitor 5pm – 6am” permit type
at this link. Once registration is complete, visitors will not need to print or display a permit; the new system utilizes camera-based License Plate Recognition technology. All vehicles must park front-end in, so that the license plate is visible.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
Astrophysics Research at the Three College Observatory
– presented by
Anatoly Miroshnichenko, PhD,
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Three College Observatory (TCO) was opened in Alamance County, NC, in 1981 as a collaborative project of three colleges located in Greensboro, UNCG, NC A&T University, and Guilford College. It hosts one of the four largest telescopes on the US Atlantic coast (primary mirror diameter 32 inches).
For the first 30 years, TCO was predominantly used for public viewing of planets, stars, and galaxies, which became very popular due to its central location in the state. In 2011, the UNCG Department of Physics and Astronomy acquired a high-quality spectrograph and started a long-term research program.
Some 12,000 spectra of over 500 stars have been taken on 1300 nights since then. Analysis of these data has been reported in 40 research papers and at several regional and international conferences yearly since 2013. The Observatory was fully automated in 2019 and can be operated over the Internet from any place in the world. No other astronomical observatory in North Carolina has such a capability in stellar spectroscopy. Collaborations with professional and amateur astronomers from Mexico, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, India, Chile, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Brazil, and Belgium have been established.
Turning points in the TCO history and results of some projects that have been or being conducted, such as studying pulsations of the Polar star, gaseous disks around classical “Be” stars, double stars with dusty-and-gaseous envelopes and refining orbits of bright binary systems will be presented.