November 01, 2017

Guest Blog Post! Summarizing How the Planet Nine Debate Has Evolved

November 01, 2017/ Stephanie Hamilton

I recently had the exciting opportunity to write a blog post for Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society!

The post summarizes a session at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Science in Provo, Utah. Specifically, the session was all about the mysterious (and still hypothetical) new planet proposed in the outer solar system. To learn more, go check out the post!

(Also, if you like learning about space and planetary stuff, you should definitely go check Emily out!)

August 28, 2017

Day to Night and Back Again: The Great American Eclipse

August 28, 2017/ Stephanie Hamilton

Just…wow. I feel like I’ve been saying this for the past several years with all of the amazing traveling I’ve been fortunate to do during my physics career, but this was honestly one of the coolest experiences I’ve had. There are simply no words to describe witnessing a total solar eclipse, but I’ll try my best anyway!

I’ve witnessed a couple of partial eclipses in the past, but being present for a total solar eclipse was a top item on my bucket list. I had been anticipating the eclipse of August 21, 2017 for years, and I knew I had to be in the path of totality when the time finally came. Everything seemed to fall perfectly into place within the last few months leading up to the eclipse (and the last year, really) – my boyfriend’s best friend moved to Seattle to take a job at SpaceX, my cousin moved to central Oregon within an hour’s drive of the path of totality, and the eclipse was due to happen within a week of both my and my boyfriend’s birthdays. Honestly, I think the universe would have struck me down if I hadn’t booked a trip to the Pacific Northwest!

Stop #1: Seattle, Washington

My boyfriend and I began our Pacific Northwest tour with four days in Seattle, complete with walking around the city, a baseball game, museums, and hiking. Our Seattle hosts showed us around Pike Place Market during our first afternoon in the city after treating us to a delicious brunch. Afterward, we headed to the Starbucks Roastery (of course I had to get fresh Starbucks coffee in Seattle!). The rest of the day was spent enjoying ice cream and good drinks before heading to a Mariners baseball game. Our weekend concluded with another delicious brunch, a tour of the (outside of the) SpaceX complex in Redmond, WA, and exploring the flight museum.

While our hosts worked during the day on Monday and Tuesday, my boyfriend and I took the opportunity to do some touristy things in Seattle: go up in the Space Needle, walk through the Chihuly Glass Museum, and see the Olympic Sculpture Park. After a 13+ mile day of walking, naturally we then had to do a four-mile hike to Rattlesnake Ledge the following day, in the mountains outside of Seattle. Even though our feet were screaming at us a bit, the hike was definitely worth it and the view from the ledge was fantastic!

We spent a final night with our hosts in Seattle before picking up a rental car and making the 6 hour drive down to Bend, OR, where we would stay with my cousin and prepare for the eclipse!

Stop #2: Bend, Oregon

What better way to spend a couple of days in Bend than touring breweries? Unfortunately, we didn’t get to traverse the infamous “Bend Ale Trail,” though we did check off a few of the breweries on the list during our dinner outings. During our two days in Bend, however, while my cousin and her boyfriend were working, my boyfriend and I took advantage of the endless outdoorsy options for things to do. Our first day was spent hiking in Smith Rock State Park (after sleeping in quite a bit in the morning…). Let me tell you, the Misery Ridge Trail lived up to its name. Luckily we chose to hike the correct direction around the loop – we conquered the bulk of the difficult climbing at the beginning and enjoyed a relatively easy and leisurely hike around the ridge and back down the other side. I definitely would not have wanted to hike in the other direction! Anyway, the views were amazing:

The first half of our second day in Bend was spent at the Lava Lands National Park, where we toured the awesome site of a volcanic eruption dated to around 7,000 years ago. Even after all that time, there is still hardly anything living in the basalt fields! We then rode a shuttle to the rim of the volcanic cinder cone, where wildlife still existed and the huge, vast expanse of the lava field was visible. Sort of. Unfortunately, smoke from the Milli Wildfire in Sisters, OR had been blown directly over where we were. Not only did the smoke partly conceal what was surely an awesome view, but it also made it hard to breathe. We returned back to Bend to take a nice float down the Deschutes River in a tube, and then it was time to pack for our journey to the path of totality! (…that would make a great movie title!)

In the Path of Totality

The reality of the solar eclipse didn’t truly start to set in for me until the four of us officially set out from Bend on Saturday, August 19th to secure a campsite in the path of totality. I could feel my excitement building up, and that feeling didn’t go away for the subsequent few days. We wound our way through the Oregon high desert, heading north and east out of the smoke cloud emanating from the Milli Wildfire near Bend. Our destination was Hamilton, OR, in honor of my cousin’s and my last names! Unfortunately, Hamilton was quite a bit farther than we originally anticipated, so we stopped early and were fortunate enough to secure one of the last campsites at a county park near Fossil, OR.

After a full week of exploring (for my boyfriend and I) and work (for my cousin and her boyfriend), we were pretty content with relaxing and being disconnected from the busy world outside of our campsite. We spent the subsequent day and a half lying in our hammocks or chatting around the picnic table, with a short break to hike up a nearby hill and scope out our viewing spot for the eclipse. The hike was made considerably more interesting by the fact that it went through a cattle range – the cowpies were practically endless!

We were up and moving bright and early at 8am on August 21st. While the partial phase of the eclipse didn’t start until after 9am and the hike up the hill only took about 20 minutes, I couldn’t wait to get up there! Though, of course, once we were finally at our viewing spot the subsequent hour-long wait was a bit painful…but with eclipse glasses in hand, we started watching the sun for signs of the moon’s shadow.

The Eclipse

During the first third of the partial phase (about 20 minutes), there was practically no difference on Earth aside from the fact that there was a very obvious chunk of the sun missing when viewed through the eclipse glasses. Then, however, the air began to feel a bit cooler and the wind started to pick up. The changing temperature was particularly noticeable in the desert because of the lack of humidity in the air. By the final 20 minutes of the partial phase, it was becoming quite chilly and my eyes could discern a very slight darkening of the world around me. The sensation is difficult to describe – it almost felt as if something was a bit “off” with my eyes, like they weren’t quite working properly. It continued to get cooler as the moon continued to slide over the face of the sun, while the sky remained ever so slightly darker than a bright day.

The last five minutes (read: five minutes!) of the partial phase were incredible, second only to the minute and a half of totality itself. During these five minutes, we could watch the last bit of the crescent sun sliding away (through our glasses, of course). Things began to feel very eery as the world prepared for sunset at 10:30am – in those moments, I completely understood why solar eclipses have the reputation they do in ancient stories. It must have been terrifying to witness the sky darken and the sun blink out in the middle of the day! The sky quickly grew noticeably darker as the temperature continued to drop. In the last moments before totality, we easily spotted Venus shining brightly overhead. I put on my glasses one last time to watch the last sliver of the sun disappear…

The scene that met my eyes when I removed my glasses is burned forever into my memory. The sky had taken on a bluish-black color characteristic of late evening, while the reds and oranges of sunset were visible around the full 360 degrees of the horizon. But most amazing of all was the sun – it was covered completely by the impossibly black disk of the moon, leaving the white, wispy corona to shine brilliantly in a beautiful halo against the blue-black sky. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it.

All too soon, a mere 90 seconds later, the famous “diamond ring” reappeared: the sun was returning, with its light overwhelming the corona and the black disk of the moon in a matter of seconds. My cousin, me, and our boyfriends all turned toward each other with expressions of “That was amazing!” written on our faces. To be honest, it was considerably more than “amazing.” I wasn’t kidding when I said there aren’t words to describe it! There is simply no comparison between a total eclipse and a partial eclipse – during a parital eclipse, you never get the drastic darkening of the sky, the experience of seeing stars during the day, the overwhelming excitement caused by knowing what these eery phenomena are leading to, or the image of a black moon surrounded by the brilliant white corona. All I can say is that I will definitely be in the path of totatilty for the next total eclipse in the US in April 2024, and you should be too!

August 07, 2017

Astronomy, Telescopes, and Bears, Oh My! (Part 3)

August 07, 2017/ Stephanie Hamilton

Welcome to Part 3 of my blog series documenting my amazing time as an instructor of a ground-based astronomy course based at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, AZ! If you missed Part 1 or Part 2, be sure to head over there and check out those posts! If you haven’t browsed through my photo album of the trip, you should do that also! Enough chatter, let’s get to the post.

Monday, May 22nd

Not going to lie, this was probably one of my favorite days out of my month in Arizona (or in the top five at the very least). Why? Well, we got to take a field trip to another of the many observatories in southern Arizona, and man was this a cool one! What wasn’t so cool was the 2.5 hour drive to get there, but it was worth it.

Our destination was the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, home of the VERITAS gamma ray telescope and the 6-m Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), which has, you guessed it, a single mirror. Wait a second…well, it used to be made of multiple mirrors, but let this be a lesson to all of you considering getting into the telescope naming business. The MMT is somewhat of a testing telescope, in that it was the first to use an array of mirrors as the primary “mirror” and it was also the first to have a primary mirror larger than 4-m. Of course, to install the giant 6-m mirror they had to first remove the multiple mirrors, leaving us with the now inaccurate name.

The first part of our tour was a video about the construction of the MMT. You might be thinking, “Oh, well that’s cool, but haven’t you been learning about telescopes for the past two weeks?” Well, yes, but the MMT is no ordinary telescope. You see, it’s perched on a very pointy peak and the road up the mountain is very steep with no guard rails, culminating in a 24% grade incline to the telescope site. Not to mention that there isn’t actually room for anything larger than a van to turn around up there…it might not be surprising then that the observatory doesn’t actually allow members of the public to drive up there themselves. Instead, we got to ride up in a fancy school bus!

We wound our way up the steep, winding, dirt road, taking a couple of hours to reach our picnic spot after stopping briefly at an older observatory with lots of historical telescopes. After lunch, we were given the option to either walk the remaining half-mile to the summit or to ride in the SUVs they had ready for us. Remember that I said nothing larger than a van can turn around up there? Yes, that includes busses….I opted to walk. During the walk (and also during the whole bus ride up, to be honest) I was thinking about the process of getting that huge 6-m mirror up this crazy road – 1) the truck driver couldn’t see the road during that last stretch with a 24% incline so had to be directed and 2) they had to use a crane to pick up the truck and turn it around so it could drive back down the mountain! To this day, I still wonder who decided it would be a good idea to put that observatory where it is.

Here are some fun facts about the MMT:

The MMT has served as a testbed for new astronomical instrumentation and imaging techniques, helping move astronomy forward.
As mentioned before, it’s not actually made of multiple mirrors anymore! Instead, it has a single 6-m primary mirror. Consequently, “MMT” isn’t actually an acronym anymore.
They actually had to expand the building once the 6-m mirror was installed, because the telscope (primary + secondary mirrors, and all the necessary structural supports) didn’t fit anymore.
The MMT was the first telescope to have a deformable secondary mirror, which allows for real-time corrections to atmospheric distortions of light and greatly improves the quality of data collected.
The MMT was the first large telescope to use an altitude-azimuth mount (like the WIYN telescope) rather than an equatorial mount (like the Mayall telescope).
Rather than the telescope rotating inside the building to switch observing targets, the entire building rotates with the telescope! Consequently, the building has snow plow shovels attached to it to clear snow pile-ups as it rotates.
They were having a problem with cold air leaking from the telescope and messing up observing conditions inside the building, so the solution was to run to Walgreens to buy shower caps to put over the leaking vents.

Panoramic view from the road leading to the Mt. Hopkins summit

Tuesday, May 23rd

Tuesday was a pretty uneventful day in comparison to Monday. The morning consisted of a lecture about how observatory sites are chosen (I’m still not convinced they really thought the MMT Observatory through…). Some basic criteria for an astronomical observatory site are that it be away from light pollution, in a dry place (water in the air really messes with the quality of the images, causing the stars to shimmer), reasonably accessible, and generally at a high elevation (higher air is generally drier, and there’s also less air to begin with).

In the afternoon we took yet another tour of the WIYN and Mayall telescopes, this time focusing on the telescope domes and enclosures. The domes’ purposes are to stabilize the air for the telescope and camera to improve data quality. The Mayall telescope’s building also had one more notable design choice – it was built 18 stories tall on the theory that data quality would be better if you could get the telescope farther from the thermal sink that is the ground. It turns out that the 18-story building really didn’t do anything, but at least the Mayall telescope is now an iconic landmark of Kitt Peak!

View of the Kitt Peak telescopes from MDM observatory

Wednesday, May 24th

Wednesday was another really cool day with another trip to a different observatory (who am I kidding, this whole month in Arizona was really cool). This trip was to the Mt. Lemmon observatory, and not only did we get to tour more interesting telescopes, but we got to hike and picnic at the top of a mountain! This was good timing, because my hiking and rock climbing urges were starting to make a comeback by this point…

Our trip started with a two hour drive in what was by now everyone’s absolute favorite 15-passenger van. This drive was quite different than the one to the MMT, in that the Mt. Lemmon Observatory was on top of a mountain with lots of popular trails frequented by tourists. So there was considerably more traffic on the way up, not to mention that we were actually able to drive ourselves up this mountain. We stopped a few times for some exploring and hiking before eating lunch prior to our appointment with the Mt. Lemmon Observatory staff.

One of the views on the way to the summit of Mt. Lemmon

Mt. Lemmon actually used to be a military site, so a lot of the buildings have that type of feel. In the past it was used as a radar station for the US Air Force, so yes, there is a radar tower there that was used to track Russian spy planes during the Cold War era. And yes, we did get to go inside it (more on that in a bit). One of our first stops was to the small telescope used for Education and Public Outreach, which I think every observatory should have! We then paid a visit to the telescope used by the Catalina Sky Survey, a Near-Earth Object (NEO) survey searching for asteroids that might pass by Earth a little too close for comfort…interestingly this survey is in direct competition with a group that operates at Kitt Peak, but the two groups seemed to be on good terms. I think in this case, everyone wins from a bit of competition. This stop was particularly fun because one of the astronomers was there that day and told us a bit about how NEOs are actually picked out of the data. While I also study objects in the Solar System, the objects I’m concerned about orbit farther away than Neptune, while this astronomer’s objects could potentially pass closer than the Moon! All in all, I definitely learned some things about how to detect the closest Solar System objects (as opposed to the farthest)!

Another stop on our tour was the recreational building which featured a lounge area, bathrooms+showers, and even an indoor basketball court. On our way out of the building we passed through an old control room that definitely looked like it hadn’t been used in a while – a lot of the stuff at this observatory was put into place in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Possibly the most obvious artifact of this was the giant radar tower (it looks more like a ball, actually) that we got to go inside. Not only was it cool learning about the history of the tower, but we had a pretty good view of the summit from on top of it.

Then it was time for the long trek back to Kitt Peak…luckily we were able to break it up with some burgers in Tucson!

Thursday, May 25th

Thursday was a bit uneventful, with the students spending the morning session working on the data analysis for their final projects. I think some of them were starting to feel the pressure a bit, with less than a week left before the final projects were due and numerous tours and off-site excursions still to happen…they made some good progress though, and most were excited for the afternoon’s tour when it came time.

I’m pretty sure we visited every single telescope on Kitt Peak during this month….if not, it was pretty darn close. Thursday’s tour was given by the same person who showed us around Mt. Lemmon (there were a LOT of cumulative driving hours between him and our group during these two days). We first visited the Steward Observatory Bok telescope. I’d been intrigued by this one for the whole month because its dome looked different from every other telescope on site. Specifically, it wasn’t the traditional dome shape. Instead, it was sort of a rounded cylinder type thing. It’s easiest just to show a picture, so that’s shown on the right. The design is supposed to help minimize vibrations from wind atop Kitt Peak, and I think it does actually help with that.

The next stop was to one of the oldest telescopes I’ve ever seen – it uses clock-style counterweights rather than hydraulic power like most modern telescopes use. The telescope really isn’t used much anymore, but that was pretty cool to see. We also got to visit the Spacewatch telescope, which is the competitor survey to the Catalina Sky Survey on Mt. Lemmon. The weirdest thing about this telescope (aside from its user climbing all over it like it was a jungle gym) was the fact that the detectors were in between the primary mirror and secondary mirror. What?! The designs I’d seen in the past had either the detectors at the primary focal point (so no secondary mirror at all) or a hole in the middle of the primary mirror where the detectors would capture the light after it reflected off the secondary mirror back toward the primary mirror. I had never seen the detectors smack in the middle of the two before. It turned out that this design was motivated by price limitations and it actually works better than you might think.

After our afternoon of tours, everyone got enjoy a free evening. Well, it was free for me, the students still had projects to finish!

Friday, May 26th

Friday morning’s lecture was actually pretty interesting. An astronomer from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) came to talk to us about the history of Kitt Peak and NOAO. I had not realized that Kitt Peak was established before NOAO was. Furthermore, astronomy used to be very much for individual astronomers. In the 50s, there wasn’t much in the way of collaboration between parties, and it was more like if someone was working on a specific project, others wouldn’t touch it. With the formation of NOAO and the Association for Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) around the 60s, astronomy started to become more of a public, collaborative effort. This was a source of tension for a while because time on telescopes was allotted based on contribution – that is, large universities with more funding got more time while small ones were blocked out. Another source of tension was that money started being directed into building fewer larger telescopes. While some smaller parties still feel this way, I think tensions have largely eased by this point.

The afternoon’s tour wasn’t all that exciting, so I won’t spend much time on it…we toured the facilities of Kitt Peak – that is, the power generators, water systems, and the like. I realize this stuff is very important for a functioning observatory, but I personally didn’t have much interest in the tour. It was pretty amazing to see the giant generators though – they could keep the entire observatory running for many hours.

Saturday, May 27th

Yay, another off-site excursion! Back into our favorite van! Today’s excursions were to the ASARCO Copper Mine, the Titan Missile Museum, and the San Xavier del Bac Mission.

First up, the copper mine. I was pretty excited because I had never seen such a huge mine so close. We took a tour bus out to a lookout point overlooking the mine and it took me a while to grasp the scale of this thing. The only clues my brain had were how tiny the giant dump trucks were down at the bottom (or at least as far as I could see). Another clue was pointed out by our tour guide: “See that opposite rim? That’s two miles away.” While the mine was certainly impressive, it turns out that copper mines stink. Like, really bad. So as we were tracing the steps of copper ore from its raw form to final form, all I could think was that it was smelling worse and worse. It turns out that processing copper ore is really disgusting, and I admire the people who are able to do it.

Looking up at the nose of the missile at the Titan Missile Musuem

The next stop was the Titan Missile Museum, which was definitely one of the coolest places we saw during this whole month. It’s a retired Cold-War-era bunker that would have been one of the places a nuclear missile was launched from had things come to that. Also, the missile housed there was the largest ever used by the US. Consequently, it would been one of the places targeted by the USSR…so it had to be able to withstand a nuclear detonation nearby. We got to walk through the command room, and a couple of our students even got to act as commanders and go through the launch sequence. Finally, we walked to the other end of the bunker to see the beast itself – the missile with the (decommissioned) warhead. That was kind of surreal actually. It was huge! And, unfortunately, impossible to capture the scale of in a picture…but of course, that didn’t stop me from trying.

Our last stop of the day was the San Xavier del Bac Mission, which on our way back from the missile museum. It was a beautiful old church established by the Spanish on Tohono O’odham (the native people of that region) land. Interestingly, a large percentage of Tohono O’odham are devoutly Catholic as a result of Spanish conquest. People come from around the reservation, which is one of the largest in the Southwestern US, to worship at this mission.

Sunday, May 28th

The end of another week means another day off! Since it was Memorial Day weekend, I decided to take the rental car down to Tucson to visit a friend who is in graduate school at the University of Arizona. He and a bunch of his friends were planning to have a pool party and BBQ, as one does for Memorial Day. Of course, I hadn’t brought my swimsuit because there are no pools on Kitt Peak….but I still had fun eating great food and relaxing by the poolside! After heading back to Kitt Peak, I spent the rest of the evening with a good book.

We’re almost there friends. We’re almost done with this crazy amazing adventure I had in southern Arizona. Be sure to check back soon for Part 4 of this series!

July 30, 2017

Astronomy, Telescopes, and Bears, Oh My! (Part 2)

July 30, 2017/ Stephanie Hamilton

Welcome to Part 2 of my blog series documenting my amazing time as an instructor of a ground-based astronomy course based at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, AZ! If you missed Part 1, be sure to head over there and check out that post before you jump into this one! If you haven’t browsed through my photo album of the trip, you should do that also! And without further ado…

Tuesday, May 18th

As you may recall from Part 1, we had the last night of our observing run at the 2.4m and 1.3m telescopes at the MDM Observatory on Sunday night, meaning Monday night was the first night back on a normal sleep schedule. Because of this, there were no activities scheduled on Tuesday morning, but everyone was pretty antsy for Tuesday afternoon’s activity. Why, you ask? Well, we were taking a trip to the Arizona Desert Museum – that’s right, we were leaving the mountain for the first time in about 10 days! As much as I loved being up at the summit of Kitt Peak, I was also ready for a change in scenery, even if it was only going to be for a few hours.

When I think of the word “museum,” I generally think of various exhibits arranged in a strategic way inside a giant building. The Arizona Desert Museum was about as far from that as one can get – the entire museum was outdoors! I would have called it more of a zoo, actually, with different plants and animals native to desert ecosystems as the exhibits. Consequently, it was unlike any zoo I’ve ever been in. First of all, it was located in the mountains north of Tucson, meaning that at certain points within the museum there were fabulous views of the desert landscape in and around Tucson. Second, how often does one walk through a museum or a zoo that has cacti everywhere? (Side note: there were also little baby cacti in tiny pots in the gift shop! No, I wasn’t tempted at all…).

The first exhibit we walked through was a hummingbird exhibit, with the hummingbirds freely flying around and only a net keeping them from escaping the exhibit. I seem to recall having to duck out of the way of at least one hummingbird that zoomed right by my head…that was certainly the most…interactive….exhibit we encountered! We continued around the museum, seeing everything from birds to wolves to even some otters. The exhibit I was most excited for, though, was the black bear exhibit (especially after all the hype about the black bear roaming the summit of Kitt Peak). As per my luck, naturally there was no black bear visible when we arrived at the exhibit. However, our patience was rewarded and a few minutes later we spotted a bear lumbering around in the shadows! I was quite glad that this was the only black bear I ended up seeing during my whole stay at Kitt Peak.

The day ended with stopping for some delicious Mexican food and a margarita before continuing on to the mountain for the night.

Wednesday, May 17th

Wednesday began with a lecture on optical and infrared telescopes. We talked about how telescopes direct light to magnify distant objects, the different ways one can construct a telescope, and the pros and cons of each telescope design. You might not know that there are at least five different basic telescope designs, each with their own pros and cons!

After finishing up the lecture talking about differences in telescope tubes and sizes and summarizing all of the major telescopes that have been built or are in the works, we took another tour of the WIYN and Mayall telescopes. This time, we were focusing on the physical construction of the scopes – mounts, structure, tubes, and the like. While at the 4-m Mayall telescope, our guide brought the telescope to its “service position” so that we could clearly see the mirror and the inner workings. We also got to climb into the “Cassegrain Cage,” or the chamber-like space at the bottom of the telescope below the mirror. Let me tell you, it’s a bit disconcerting sitting down there knowing there’s a 30-ton mirror and all of the other metal and telescope structure right above your head…

Thursday, May 18th

Two off-mountain excursions within three days?! This is madness! Yes, that’s right, we got to leave the mountain again! This excursion was pretty cool – we got to go to the CCD lab and the mirror lab to learn about how the camera CCD detectors and the mirrors of telescopes are made!

The first stop was the CCD lab. We were actually very fortunate to get a full tour of the lab, thanks to Sally’s connections at the University of Arizona – they usually don’t take groups back into the lab to see the CCD-making process up close and personal. But we got to see everything! Dr. Mike Lesser was our guide for the morning and he first showed us the chemical treatment baths used to treat and finish the freshly made CCD detector chips. So I guess we started the tour with a major spoiler alert, seeing the final step of manufacture first. We then got to see how the silicon pieces arrive at the lab (roughly cut to size but definitely not in their final shapes), how the tiny micro/nano-scale electronics are installed, how the chips are tested for quality (we saw the testing of CCDs that will be installed on LSST!), and finally what they look like once they are finished. I even got to take a selfie in one of the biggest CCD chips ever made!

A selfie in one of the largest CCD chips ever made (10k x 10k)

After some delicious Chicago-style pizza for lunch, it was time to visit the mirror lab! Except, not quite…we were a little early, so we decided to check out the planetarium at the University of Arizona. Not a bad way to kill an extra hour! I was pretty excited, though, once we made our way over to the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. I’ve long been curious how the heck one would make a giant, 4-, 6-, or 8-m mirror that is flatter than the US would be if you blew everything up to that scale. And how one would accomplish this without breaking things.

It turns out that there is a single company that makes the special type of glass needed for telescope mirrors. Which is pretty scary, because if that company goes under then we wouldn’t know where to get the glass we need…I’ll just hope that doesn’t happen! Anyway, this lab made the LSST 8-m mirror, but unfortunately it had already started its journey down to Chile by the time we took our tour. However, they are currently casting the mirrors for another huge telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will consist of seven 8-m mirrors in an array. Just let that sink in for a second….

Here’s the basic process for casting your very own giant telescope mirror!

The first thing that happens is a mold is made for the size and shape the mirror is supposed to be. Many mirrors nowadays are made in the “honeycomb” style – hollow hexagonal tube structures make up the backside of the mirror, which drastically cuts down on the amount of glass in and the weight of the final mirror.
Then the mold (which can be 8 meters in diameter, remember!) is hand packed full of chunks of that special glass.
The technicians build an oven around the mold. Yes, you read that right. This oven gets up to several thousands of degrees Celsius and the mold spins for somewhere around three days (the exact rate of spinning is determined by the final desired curvature of the mirror).
Carefully slow down the spinning and cool the furnace for 100 days. Yes, that is one hundred days. This is a very delicate process! We don’t want any deformations at all in the final, cooled piece of glass.
Pick up your several-tens-of-tons piece of glass and move it to the grinding and polishing station. Whatever you do, don’t drop it.
Grind and polish for weeks. Literally. Remember, everything needs to be smoother than the continental US!
Once the polishing is complete, the proto-mirror is packaged and sent on to its destination, where it will be coated in reflective aluminum and installed on the telescope!

I highly recommend reading this article about the casting of the LSST mirrors – the scale of the process is astounding!

An 8m piece of glass gets polished inside the Steward Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona

The day ended with shadowing a couple of observers at the 4-m Mayall telescope, one of whom was my own advisor at Michigan! It was a little weird seeing him and catching up on two weeks of research on the other side of the country…anyway, the students got some more insight into the exciting lives of 21st century astronomers – that is, watching multiple computer screens to monitor the telescope, data quality, and any alerts that might come up. That’s a little different from how things were even 30 years ago, when astronomers worked in rooms just off the main telescope room that had windows so they could see the telescope itself.

Friday, May 19th

Friday was another exciting day with another cool tour of one of the telescopes at Kitt Peak. This time, it was of a radio telescope with a 12-m dish (think satellite TV dish, except 10 times bigger). After a morning lecture about radio astronomy, we made the short drive over to the ARO radio telescope.

A cool thing about radio astronomy is that is doesn’t have to be done only at night – you can observe radio targets during the day! Consequently, this is also why all cell phones have to be set to airplane mode on the Kitt Peak summit, because you never know when the radio astronomers will be observing. All of this meant that when we showed up for our tour at 1pm, the astronomers were prepping the telescope to start observations. Don’t worry, though, we still had plenty of time to explore the telescope (including climbing inside its Cassegrain cage equivalent!) before the actual observations started.

Here are some tidbits you might not know about radio telescopes and astronomy:

Radio telescopes don’t actually need domes! The ARO telescope only does because they wanted a little more protection from the elements.
Radio dishes are made out of carbon fiber and coated with nickel. Some of the largest ones can even be made out of mesh or chicken wire.
The resolution of the telescope is inversely proportional to its size – that is, larger telescopes have coarser resolution.
The ARO telescope uses a prototype dish for the ALMA telescope in Chile, one of the premier radio telescope facilities in the world!

The ARO 12m radio telescope at Kitt Peak

Saturday, May 20th

Tonight was finally the night of the Alumni Star Party! This event invites UofM alumni (mostly local, but a couple of professors from UofM flew to Tucson for the party) to a reception and a chance to observe through an eyepiece through the 1.3m and 2.4m telescopes that the students used to take their data. With a list of targets in hand, including planets, galaxies, and nebulae, we began directing the telescope as one of the UofM professors explained the science and history behind the particular target we were looking at. We got to see Jupiter, its moons, Saturn and its rings, the Andromeda galaxy, and even a comet! All in all, it was a really awesome experience meeting these distinguished alumni of UofM and showing them some cool astronomy objects!

Jupiter as viewed through the 1.3m telescope at MDM observatory

Saturn as viewed through the 1.3m telescope at the MDM observatory

Sunday, May 21st

Whew, another free day…after a busy week, it was nice to have a day off to do some more exploring! After relaxing a bit and eating some lunch, I started making my way to a trail I found out about by talking to one of the Kitt Peak staff members. I had been craving some good rock climbing and hiking since I arrived at Kitt Peak! With a book in hand (well, backpack actually), I set off through the woods with the intent of climbing some rocks, gosh darn it.

I’m pleased to report that I was successful in that endeavor! There is a very prominent rock formation that is visible from many sites on Kitt Peak, and the trail went right to it. I had a great couple of hours exploring every nook and cranny of those rocks, climbing right to the tippy-top (sorry Mom!) and enjoying my book with the valley splayed out way below me. I even made a lizard friend while I was up there!

View from a rocky outcrop at the top of Kitt Peak

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for Part 3 in this series!

July 21, 2017

Astronomy, Telescopes, and Bears, Oh My! (Part 1)

July 21, 2017/ Stephanie Hamilton

….ok, I never actually saw the bear….but we were thoroughly warned before (and after) we arrived at the mountain that there was a resident black bear roaming the premises. And I can confirm that the bear was sighted during the time we were there, though not by anyone in our group.

This May, I had the fantastic opportunity to travel to Kitt Peak National Observatory, located about 50 miles southwest of Tucson, AZ, to teach a great group of undergraduates about ground-based observatories. Over the course of four short weeks, the students developed a science idea to test, wrote a telescope observing proposal based on that idea, took their own data using two telescopes at Kitt Peak, reduced and analyzed the data, and presented their results. And this was all done while having to sit in lectures, go on tours (both on the Kitt Peak site and off), and participate in several other off-site excursions! Thinking back, it’s really amazing how much the students were able to accomplish, and to such a high standard! (Can you tell I’m proud of them?)

As an instructor, I was fortunate enough to get an all-expenses-paid trip (plus a paycheck!) to a gorgeous mountaintop with greenery and wildlife, awesome telescopes, and beautiful sunsets. It was probably the best experience I’ve had in graduate school so far, so I am writing this blog post to memorialize it and share it with all of you! I’ll be splitting this experience into several posts, due to the jam-packed schedule and sheer number of things we were able to do and see over the course of our month at Kitt Peak. So stay tuned for subsequent posts in this series!

Oh, and make sure you check out my photos, too! Stephanie’s Obnoxiously Long Kitt Peak Photo Album

Sunday, May 7th

After pretty smooth travels (aside from a two hour delay in Minneapolis) I FINALLY arrived in Tucson! This was my first time in Southern Arizona, so I was excited to see this new place. Of course, the first thing I noticed was all of the brown – brown ground, brown trees, brown weeds….and then Sally (the professor of the class) said as we were driving up Kitt Peak the first time, “Wow, it’s pretty green here still!”…WHAT? After she said it, I could see some green in there, but coming from Michigan pretty much anything else seems brown by comparison.

The students were assigned dorm rooms in pairs, while Sally and I would be staying in the guest house on site. Accommodations were basically what you’d expect from a facility constructed in the 1960s – wood paneled walls, fluffy carpet, a single ethernet modem that was very obviously wired after the house was built….not even kidding, there was an obvious hole in the exterior wall. Nonetheless, I was happy to be staying in a place with my own bedroom, a kitchen, and internet access (evidently the dorm where the students stayed didn’t even have ethernet! #firstworldproblems?).

After settling in a bit, we all piled into our giant 15-passenger van (a completely necessary vehicle with 12 students and 2 instructors, thankfully I didn’t have to drive it) and headed to one of the two telescopes we would be using the following weekend (the Hiltner 2.4-meter and the McGraw-Hill 1.3-meter) to shadow an astronomer who was using it for the night. It was actually super cool to see astronomy behind-the-scenes on the very first night at the observatory! We didn’t hang around too long though, due to our jet-lagged brains screaming at us for being awake at (what felt like) 3am…

Looking out over Kitt Peak toward the Mayall 4m telescope

Monday, May 8th

Day 1 of class was pretty uneventful, with a general introduction to the site and the structure of the class. In general, each day consisted of an AM, PM, and evening activity – these consisted primarily of lectures and site tours toward the beginning, but transitioned to more off-site excursions toward the end. More on those later! We were welcomed to the observatory by none other than the director herself, Lori Allen (side note: how awesome is it that the director of a major American astronomical observatory is a woman?!). We learned from her the difficulties that come with funding an observatory whose largest telescopes are now considered painfully mid-sized, and all of the hoops they need to jump through. The National Science Foundation was actually about to close this historic and beautiful observatory until its largest telescope was chosen to be used for a huge upcoming survey, DESI.

Tuesday, May 9th

Day 2 was a bit more interesting than Day 1, with tours to two of the bigger telescopes on site planned – the 2.3-meter WIYN telescope and the 4-meter Mayall telescope (where DESI will be installed). These two scopes are quite different in their designs; for example, the Mayall lives in an 18-story concrete/metal building, while the WIYN lives in a 4 story building….this has to do primarily with the way the telescopes are mounted and controlled. In the old days before advanced computers, it was much easier to align one of the telescope’s axes of motion with Earth’s axis of rotation. This way, when an astronomer was tracking an object across the sky, she only had to worry about a single axis of rotation.

The issue with this design is that by having one axis aligned with Earth’s rotational axis, one ends up with the weight of the telescope somewhat suspended in midair. Consequently, the supports for the telescope need to be much bigger in order to securely support its weight. A better design is one that doesn’t have to fight gravity as much – instead, have one axis be horizontal to the ground (like a merry-go-round) and have the second axis be a simple up-and-down movement. Unfortunately, this design was not practical until more advanced computers came along that could precisely control the two axes simultaneously in order to track an object across the sky. Now that that’s possible, however, telescopes built today use this second design. The pictures below show these two designs: on the left is the first and on the right is the second.

The Mayall 4m telescope’s equatorial mount

The WIYN 3.5m telescope’s altitude-azimuth mount

We wrapped up the rest of the day with a couple of lectures and a meal in the cafeteria. I have to say, I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food up at the summit – I had heard horror stories about the cafeteria-grade food by some colleagues, but I enjoyed every meal throughout the month!

Wednesday, May 10th

I think by the third day, the students were starting to become aware of the work that would be required of them during the month…this was the day they needed to choose a telescope on-site that they would write five pages about, with only a couple of days until their project observing proposals were due, complete from choosing a topic to study to determining the amount of time and the instruments they would need on the telescopes to describing the science product they expected to obtain at the end. Let’s just say I much preferred the instructor role, available to help when needed but also able to sit under a tree with a book when I wanted…

In the evening, we had the chance to head over to one of telescopes we’d be using in just a couple of days, the McGraw-Hill 1.3-meter at the MDM observatory (fun fact: “MDM” stands for MIT, Dartmouth, and Michigan, in honor of the founding institutions of this subset of telescopes. MIT has since left the collaboration, and the remaining institutions have been joined by Ohio State, Ohio University, and Columbia University. Yet it’s still called MDM…astronomers, I tell ya). Was this the start of our observing run? No, actually we were going to watch an astronomer at the University of Michigan begin his night of observing from the comfort of his own office. This “remote observing” is quite bizarre to witness – imagine you’re sitting in a room surrounded by the computers that control the telescope, yet the mouse is moving on its own, the lights in the dome turn on and off by themselves, and the telescope just starts moving….yes, obviously there was a human controlling these things, but it was strange knowing they were doing so from 2,000 miles away!

Thursday, May 11th

Thursday was a pretty chill day overall, at least for Sally and I. For the students, it was a combination of stressful in the morning as they put the finishing touches on their observing proposal drafts and relaxation/decompression after said stress. The afternoon saw a brief lecture from me, but the evening is when the real fun started.

We piled into our 15-passenger van once again (this became a very common theme throughout the month…I had a love/hate relationship with that van) and made our way to the MDM observatory to get familiar with the instruments we’d be using. We of course watched the sunset before getting to work, as all astronomers do (what can we say, they never get old!). I’ve come to the conclusion that no sunset compares to those seen from mountain tops in the desert – the reddened sunlight just mixes so perfectly with the dusty brown/red landscape, and mountains are always gorgeous photo targets. I have no idea how many sunset pictures I took over the course of the month, but this one has to be my favorite:

Sunset from the 1.3m telescope at MDM Observatory

After sunset, we began standard procedures to prepare the telescopes for a night of observing. We weren’t officially scheduled to begin observing until Friday night, but we wanted to be familiar with the instruments and procedures before we actually had to do it for real. I took the helm at the 1.3m, while Sally was in control at the 2.4m. The start up and shut down procedures became second nature by the end of our four nights at the scopes:

Fill the detector dewar with liquid nitrogen in order to keep it cold all night.
Open exterior doors to the dome to equilibrate the air temperature inside the dome and reduce turbulence.
Open the dome shutter, then open the telescope mirror covers.
Open any field stops to ensure light can reach the detector.
Tell the telescope to begin tracking Earth’s rotation. Then, move to a bright star and ensure the telescope is pointing where it thinks it is.
Observe!
Perform 1–5 in reverse to shut down.

It was after 2am by the time we had ironed out any kinks in the procedures and gained confidence in operating the telescopes, so with an unplanned half-night of observing under our belts, we went to bed eagerly anticipating our full weekend of observing ahead. Or, at least, I was – I’ve come to really enjoy staying up all night in the peaceful company of other astronomers and with the ability to go outside and see incredible night skies whenever I want. Maybe I’m crazy, or maybe I’m just meant to be an astronomer. There’s nothing like it!

Friday, May 12th — Monday, May 15th

Hooray, it was finally observing weekend! Granted, we had literally all of Friday to get through first, and maybe I was the only one actually excited about staying up all night to operate a multi-million-dollar instrument, but I think the students were eager as well….at the very least to operate said instruments. After submitting final drafts of their observing proposals and a lecture from me, and after arming ourselves with snacks and coffee, we were ready for our first full night of observing!

We watched sunset, as per usual, and then dispersed to our selected telescopes – I was again in charge of the smaller 1.3m telescope, while the majority of the students opted to use the 2.4m. Aside from being bigger, the 2.4m had different instruments installed that would perform spectroscopy (essentially decomposing all of the light from a source into the amount of light per wavelength), which most of the students’ projects required. This all meant that my job was actually pretty easy! Things went smoothly the whole night, at least at the 1.3m, and I was glad that the first observing experience (ever, for some of the students) went so well!

We wrapped up around 5:30am (I know, crazy), and then slept until the next afternoon. I always feel extremely lazy when observing because I wake up at 2pm or later, even though I stay up until 5:30 or 6am…I’m a night owl for sure, but definitely not nocturnal! Anyway, Saturday afternoon was our mock Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC)…even though we had observed already…oh well, the schedule can always be adjusted! The purpose of the TAC is to evaluate all observing proposals submitted, discuss strengths and weaknesses along with the impact of each, and then give each proposal an overall score. In our class, the top-ranked proposals then got the amount of time at the time of night they requested, while the lower-ranked proposals did not get all of the time they asked for (in the real world, the bottom-ranked proposals don’t get any time at all, if the telescope gets filled up!). I was incredibly impressed with the level of the discussions by the students about each proposal – Sally even said that it was at the level of a real TAC! Our observing schedule was modified slightly based on the evaluations of our mock TAC, and then it was nap time.

Saturday night went pretty much exactly how Friday went – gorgeous sunset, smooth observing, watched a couple of movies (animated Pixar films, obviously!), and wrapped up around 6am. After waking up in the mid-afternoon on Sunday, I decided it was about time I explored the summit a bit, so I took my book and set off to find the perfect secluded reading spot. And oh, did I find it! Look at this view! I definitely went back here several times during the month.

Panoramic view from my reading spot on Kitt Peak. The McGrath solar telescope is on the left, while the peak on the right is known as “Elder Brother” to the Tohono O’odham people.

Sunday night was much more of the same, and again we slept until mid-afternoon on Monday. I was so glad our observing runs went so incredibly smoothly! That all too often seems not to be the case, whether it’s because of some technical failure, a software error, or just Mother Nature. After a lecture and dinner, we all had Monday night off and were able to finally try to adjust back to normal sleeping hours. This is actually starting to become second nature to me…every time I go observing, it seems like I adjust to the opposite schedule even faster than the last time.

And I think I’ll wrap this post up here. I hope you’re enjoying reading about my Kitt Peak adventure so far! I’ll be back soon with the next post in this series, in which we actually get to leave the mountain after 10 straight days on the summit. Though to be honest, I was quite happy to return to 6750 feet after only a short time in the desert heat…

Until my next post, friends!

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