For the second summer in a row, the RCT was used by students attending the astronomy camps  directed  by Dr. Don McCarthy .  Four camps held in June and July engaged a total  93 teenagers from the US and five  foreign countries .  The RCT was used for temporal monitoring of two comets, a flare star and Saturn’s moon Titan. The picture below shows the campers at the 12-meter telescope observing the transit of Venus.  The other image is a mosaic of several nights of observing Titan in orbit around Saturn, which was part of a project using Kepler’s Third Law to determine the mass of Saturn. Titan is shown as different colored dots which represent four different epochs of observations

A 30-second exposure of the HII region, M42 (the Orion Nebula) taken through the RCT’s Hα  filter.  The full-field image is nearly 10 arcminutes square with North up and East to the left. Major features such as the Dark Bay (upper left), the Bar and the Trapezium stars (center) are clearly visible.  The zoomed image presents a more detailed view of the inner region of the nebula. Stars fainter than 16th magnitude are visible near the Trapezium. Emission features such as ionized knots and shock fronts are clearly visible.