The year 2025 marked a turning point for RFO’s research program. The Research Committee transformed the RC20 telescope from a capable but manually operated instrument into a fully automated research platform, expanded into two new scientific disciplines, and established formal structures that have made the program more productive, more accessible, and more capable of producing …
Category: Research at RFO
Annual Research Report 2024: First Exoplanet Transits, New Cameras, and a Variable Star in Decline
2024 was a year of firsts and dramatic moments for the RFO Research Committee. Theteam quadrupled its image output over 2023, capturing more than 3,000 science imagesacross 78 observing nights. New cameras went into service on the RC20, exoplanettransits were successfully observed for the first time, and in September a closely watchedvariable star began one …
Citizen Scientists Confirm the Infrared Signature of Rare R Coronae Borealis Stars
R Coronae Borealis (RCB) stars are among the rarest objects in the sky. These hydrogen-deficient supergiant stars — fewer than 150 have been confirmed in our entire galaxy — experience dramatic and unpredictable brightness drops, sometimes fading by seven or eight magnitudes over just a few weeks. The cause is striking: clouds of carbon dust …
High School Students Publish Research on Double Star System WDS 22267+4433
Can two stars be gravitationally bound to each other across the void of space? Determining whether a pair of stars that appear close together in the sky are actually in orbit around each other — or merely close in our line of sight by coincidence — requires measuring their positions precisely, repeatedly, over many years. …
Watching a World Cross Its Star: RFO’s First Exoplanet Transit Campaigns
One of the most powerful methods for detecting planets around other stars is also one of the most elegantly simple: when a planet passes directly in front of its host star from our perspective, the star dims very slightly — typically by less than one percent — for a predictable period of time. The dimming …
Annual Research Report 2023: Laying the Groundwork for Citizen Science at RFO
The RFO Research Committee was founded in the spring of 2021. By 2023, it had grown into a functioning research organization with regular observing sessions, active software development, new instrumentation, student research partnerships, and an in-progress publication. This report summarizes the work of the committee across 2023 — a year of building foundations. Observations and …
Tracing Hubble’s Steps: Observing the Cepheid Variable That Revealed the Scale of the Universe
In October 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson and photographed a small section of the Andromeda Nebula — a fuzzy patch of light whose nature had been debated for years. When he examined his plates carefully, he identified a particular kind of pulsating star called a …