CU has Stars at its Fingertips
Colorado Astronomers can move 50 tons of telescope
in New Mexico with just a few taps on acomputer

By Jim Erickson
Rocky Mountain News

BOULDER-University of Colorado astronomer John Bally taps comands into his computer keyboard and seconds later, on a New Mexico peak 570 miles away, a 50-ton telescope sweeps slowly across the night sky.

The telescope locks onto its target, a tempestuous young star in the constellation Taurus, and a synthesized female voice from Bally's computer announces, "Move complete."

Welcome to the world of remote viewing with the 3.5-meter Astrophysical Research Consortium telescope, affectionately known as the ARC.

"Tons of machinery moving at my fingertips, right from here. Click, click, click, and we're moving 50 tons," Bally said.

Two years after joining a consortium of five other universities that operates the telescope, CU astronomers are trying to double their share in the New Mexico project.

The extra viewing time is needed to accommodate CU researchers, graduate students and undergraduates clamoring to use the telescope, said astronomy department Chairman Michael Shull.

"It's going so well that we don't have anywhere near theobserving time our students and faculty need," Shull said. "The demand is about three times what we can supply, and it's climbing."

CU astronomers currently own portions of 40 nights per year on the ARC, one of the most powerful telescopes in the West. It is perched on a 9,240-foot peak in southeastern New Mexico's Sacramento Mountains, east of Alamogordo.

Lured by New Mexico's clear, dark skies, astronomers at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington and New Mexico State University formed the consortium and built the telescope. It was designed so far-flung consortium astronomers could observe from their home institutions via the Internet. Routine observations began in 1994.

CU faculty members, alumni and private donors provided the $450,000 needed to join the consortium in 2001. Another $500,000 was raised for an infrared camera CU astronomers and students are building for the telescope.

Now Shull is negotiating with one of the other consortium members to buy 40 more partial nights on the telescope.

"If we can find another $500,000, we can double our share," he said.

More than half of CU's astronomy faculty have opened their own wallets. Most gave between $5,000 and $10,000.

The university kicked in $100,000.

"Most universities that have large astronomy departments have their own private access to telescopes, but CU did not," said CU astronomer Erica Ellingson.

"It's been a wonderful, really terrific change," she said. "There are a number of us here at CU who observe at other telescopes, but having our own does have a special meaning to us," she said.

Ellingson was recently scheduled to use the ARC telescope to view several clusters of galaxies 4 billion to 5 billion light-years from Earth. One light-year is 5.9 trillion miles.

Each of the clusters holds 100 or so galaxies like our Milky Way, and each galaxy has about 100 billion stars.

"Looking out to large distances means looking back in time," Ellingson said. "So by comparing objects at large distances to nearby objects, we can build a picture of the evolution of the universe over time."

Last week, Bally and graduate student Josh Walawender used the telescope to study stars being spawned from giant clouds of gas and dust in the constellation Taurus.

They're trying to understand how the stars form and how they interact with the surrounding cloud. Some of the young upstart stars shoot jets of hydrogen that light up the gas like a cosmic neon sign.

Bally was at the helm of Gilligan, an aging MacIntosh computer used to control the telescope via the Internet. Walawender manned Ginger, a Sun Microsystems computer that operates the telescope camera used to snap pictures of the newborn Taurus stars.

Every few minutes, Walawender checked for clouds by clicking to the Internet-accessible infrared weather camera at Apache Point Observatory.

"It's patchy out there," he said, eyeing some high, thin clouds drifting over the telescope. Bally decided to try to "punch right through" the cirrus clouds, and at 6:22 p.m., the astronomers took their first camera exposure.

Five minutes later, a ghostly, gossamer-edged arc of glowing gas materialized on Walawender's screen.

"There it is. Beautiful," Bally said. "Now we're doing science."

CU's participation in the Astrophysical Research Consortium enables Walawender to collect data for his doctoral thesis on star formation. Before the ARC telescope was available, his only other option was to apply for observing time at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, or some other national facility.

The New Mexico telescope is also available to some CU undergraduates. Both Ellingson and Bally have taken their undergraduate observing classes on the nine-hour drive to Apache Point.

"There's no substitute for actually spending time at a telescope, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to bring my students there," Ellingson said.

"But the time and cost of going to the telescope makes it really difficult, so part of me loves remote observing.

"I can fit it in with my teaching schedule," she said. "Work all day, then work all night, and at some point, catch up on sleep."