The Observatory at Fayetteville State University

The FSU Observatory serves the FSU Astronomy Program at Fayetteville State University. It is located on the 4th floor of the Lyons Science Building. The latitude is 35 degrees 4.357 minutes N, the longitude is 78 degrees 53.568 minutes W, and the elevation is 60 meters. Our primary telescope is a 16-inch Star Liner Cassegrain. Here is more information & telescope specifications. Here are photographs of the observatory. And here is a directory with more photographs and video from the observatory.

The Observatory used to be open to the public during FSU Astronomy Open House Events during times of the waxing cresent Moon during the Fall and Spring Academic Semesters.

Here was information about visiting the Observatory. Here was information about our support for Scouting.

A clear sky is required to use the observatory so weather forecasting is of interest. Here is the Clear Sky Clock for Fayetteville. based on data from the Canadian Meteorological Center. Here is the most recent weather forecast for Fayetteville from the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Raleigh, NC, and here is the discussion of this forecast. Here are the Current Weather Conditions at the Fayetteville Regional Airport, and at Pope Airforce Base. Here is a nearly current IR image for the eastern US from GOES 8. Cloud cover movies from the aviation digital data service are useful. And here is the current Satellite/Surface Map from Unisys Weather (here is their symbol legend). Here is Vaisala's free lightning strike map (with a 20-40 minute delay).

Professor Mattox has studied "Daytime Utilization of a University Observatory for Laboratory Instruction." He wrote a paper on this subject which will appear in the proceedings of Special Session 1, Education in Astronomy at the 2006 meeting of the International Astromonical Union in Prague. These proceedings are to be published by Cambrige University Press (editors Jay Pasachoff, Rosa Maria Ros, and Naomi Pasachoff). Here is the the published version of Mattox's paper entitled "Daytime Utilization of a University Observatory for Laboratory Instruction". Here is a preliminary version with more detail.

This work studies the requirements for daytime observation of Venus, and describes a lab where students use a CCD camera to determine the temperature of a sunspot.


Images of Venus made in daylight at the FSU Observatory on 9-28-05 and 9-26-06 respectively. Venus was at full phase and only 8 degrees from the Sun when the latter image was obtained..


An image of sunspots made at the FSU Observatory on 10/31/03

Here is more information and images of the Sun obtained at the FSU Observatory in 2003.

This site is maintained by Professor John Mattox.