Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy

Grainger Observatory

Learn under the stars
Soar through astronomical research with the Grainger Observatory. Exeter's astronomy program allows Exonians to discover and explore this exciting discipline.

State-of-the-art facilities for astronomical research.

The Phillips Exeter Academy Grainger Observatory includes two domed observatories, a heated classroom building with library and numerous additional instruments to assist students with their research.

The Observatory’s complex has lighting for both daytime and night time operations and includes instrumentation for solar and evening studies. It also includes an ambient temperature storage annex to store optics, as well an automated weather station which feeds data to the National Weather Service.

The observatory is used by the three astronomy courses at the Academy and the facility is also open to the public on clear Friday evenings when school is in session.

Astronomy Classes

It all starts in the classroom. Explore astronomy and physic classes offered in the Science Department.

Exeter Astro Blog

Dive deeper into the happenings at the Grainger Observatory through the Exeter Astro Blog, updated by Observatory director, John Blackwell.

Current Weather Conditions

Access the various current weather conditions presently seen from the Grainger Observatory.

About the Observatory

The Chart House is where you’ll do everything from learning to use a telescope to tracking prominences and solar flares. The Chart House is the main building and contains a wide variety of equipment including Questar telescopes, a heliostat, an astronomy-specific library, digital imaging workstations, a dedicated classroom, and a lab space. 

The Kurtz Dome houses a computer workstation that allows the telescope’s CCD camera to take high resolution digital images of the night sky. In addition, students complete projects here using data gathered from photometers, and a spectrograph. 

The 0.7m Dome is the largest of the three main observatory instruments and is home to an 0.70m PlaneWave CDK-700 Corrected Dall-Kirkham telescope. Dedicated to high resolution and faint object astronomy, this telescope has two focal points which can be used alternately in an observing session. One focal point holds a permanently mounted Finger Lakes Instrumentation CCD imager and 10-place filter wheel. The other can hold any number of other instruments from photoelectric photometers to high resolution fiber-fed spectrographs, all depending on a project’s particular needs. 

The Alden Dome houses a permanently mounted fiber-fed spectrograph system. Components of this dome include the Software Bisque Paramount Me German Equatorial mount which has remarkable precision for pointing and long-term tracking of celestial objects.

The Observatory also features telescopes such as the Takahashi FRC-300 Flat Field Ritchey-Chretien, which allows students to research such astrophysics topics as chemical composition and temperature of stars, stellar pulsations, stellar rotations, redshifts of stars and galaxies, double star systems, extrasolar planets detection, and planetary composition.

Other instruments include reflecting, refracting and catadioptric telescopes, CCD imagers, photometers, spectrographs, a heliostat, and an assortment of filters and other accessories are all available to assist students with their astronomy research. 

A time lapse of the May 2024 Auroral Storm seen from The Grainger Observatory in Exeter.