March 11, 2017

March 11, 2017

This morning we drove downtown to the annual Tucson Book Festival on the University campus.  I am dragging Aimee here because many of the laboratories have an open house during the event.  Our first stop is at the Science City tent to get tour tickets. 

After perusing the hundreds of book seller booths we head over to the Optical Science lab. The U of A is known for its Astronomy department.  An offspring of this focus (no pun intended) is world class optical science.  A major innovation has been Adaptive Optics, warpable lenses that can eliminate the atmospheric distortion of earth-based telescopes.  We listen to a short lecture on microscope advances.  All the new advances are using computing power to push the traditional limits of optics. We also saw a demo on Holography and another on Thermal Imaging with Infrared.

A couple doors away is the offices of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory that runs nearby Kitt Peak.  They turned one of the offices into a giant Camera Obscura. Also known as a pinhole camera, light bounced off the exterior scenery passes through a small hole in the side of the building and is magically projected onto a screen inside.  I remember doing something similar as a kid with a cardboard box to view a solar eclipse.

We finished with a tour of the Insect collection of the Arthropod department.  The manager showed us his archives of all the insects found in the local area. Not surprisingly with our warm weather, it is huge. As part of a community outreach project, he also identifies insects for locals who bring in specimens.

March 3, 2017

March 3, 2017

Southern Arizona, with its dry weather, clear skies, and scattered mountains, is a mecca for astronomers.  This morning we left early with our neighbors to drive sixty miles southwest to Kitt Peak. It is another twelve miles of windy road to reach the 7000-foot summit.  This mountaintop is the home of the National Optical Astronomical Observatory. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 spurred the USA to setup this government agency to fund and expand astronomical science.  One of the first projects was the development of Kitt Peak.

Kitt Peak today is crowded with more than two-dozen telescopes. Three are open to the public.  We sign up for a guided tour of each. The first up is the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. It is not only massive, but unlike any others. It is 500-foot long and angled at our latitude of 32°.  More than half of the length is buried in the mountain. On sunny days (not today) a large mirror is pulleyed up to the top. Sunlight is bounced down the length and then back up to the surface.  There, a detailed yard-wide solar image can be studied.  Despite its size, this 55-year old instrument is now rarely used and is ready for the trash heap.

Our second tour is to one of the oldest telescopes, the 84-inch.  Finished in 1964, it originally was fitted with a camera.  Now telescopes uses digital sensors or more likely spectroscopes for analyzing the different colors of the light.

After eating our picnic lunch in the car, our third tour is a half mile hike to the largest telescope, the Mayall 4-meter (158 inch).  We can easily see this 19-story behemoth from Tucson. Data from this instrument led to the new but controversial theory of dark matter.  As a bonus, from the outside observation deck we get a great view of the mountain and the surrounding valley.

Despite the size of the telescopes on Kitt Peak, none of them break into the top 25 largest anymore. Money is now pouring into mega telescopes that use multiple mirror arrays. Kitt Peak is becoming a dinosaur and is in danger of losing its funding.  The new telescopes are moving to Chile and Hawaii; both are much higher and less tainted with urban light.