Stellar Finds

Every season shares its own unique beauty with us, but spring bursts with especially joyful color. On the Dyer property we look forward to the first blooms of the native redbuds (Cercis canadensis) on top of our hill about this time every year. Photo by… Read More

On this date (April 9) in 1987, Vanderbilt University physicists announced a project named Deep Under Muon and Neutrino Detector (DUMAND) to study neutrinos, tiny particles that escape from stars and violent events such as supernovae. The scientists involved were especially interested… Read More

Galaxies are often very photogenic.  There are roughly as many galaxies in the observable universe, each with millions to over a trillion stars, as there are individual stars within our own galaxy, the Milky Way.  If you do the math, that means there are more stars in the… Read More

Muriel Elizabeth Mussells Seyfert (1909-1997) was an astronomer and research assistant at Harvard College Observatory.  Among other things, her work led her to discover three new planetary nebulae in the Milky Way in the mid-1930s. The discovery was picked up by the newswires… Read More

The year 1953 was special for Vanderbilt University.  Construction of the Arthur J. Dyer Observatory was completed, and the facility was officially given to the university on December 27th.  Transforming the observatory from a concept into a reality was no easy task, especially for Dr. Carl K. Seyfert,… Read More

Earth is constantly under attack from space invaders, but not the kind you usually see in the latest summer sci-fi flicks. For the most part, it is sand grain-sized particles of rock and ice that constitute the ~100 tons of debris that become part of our planet every… Read More

Visitors to Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory’s Telescope Nights will often hear the haunting calls of a great horned owl echoing through the valleys surrounding the observatory’s property.  Over the past decade, a great horned owl has called one of our nearby oak trees home a handful… Read More

  Dyer Observatory is not the first observatory of Vanderbilt University. Pictured above is Barnard Observatory, one of the first four buildings constructed on the main Vanderbilt University campus in the 1870s and eventually named in honor of Nashville’s own Edward Emerson Barnard. Housed inside… Read More