Photo Dump… Observatories 7-17!

My sabbatical is drawing quickly to an end. My Grand Tour wrapped up last week. My writing output has been lousy. I do, however, have lots and lots of pictures from the Tour that are in annotated albums over at my Google account. (My last photo dump went to my flickr account, but I got a new Android phone for the Grand Tour, so all the pictures automatically synced with Google, so there we go.) So I’m doing what I did after the Lesser Tour and dumping the pics for you to see. I then hope to go back and add commentary posts here for each leg, plus some interpretive and reflective posts on the whole experience.

So here we go. Click on the headings to see the pictures.

Arizona

Kitt Peak Observatory

Kitt Peak, near Tucson, Arizona, is the National Optical Astronomy Observatory for the United States, established in 1958. There are over two dozen telescopes of various shapes, designs, and age there ranging from 16″ to 4 meters (160″) in size. They do a nice job with their tours, visitor center, and gift shop. I also participated in a nighttime observing program, and that was also well done, despite the monsoon making actual observing impossible.

Sunset at Kitt Peak

As part of the evening program, we got to view the sunset from the crest, which was spectacular. I took many pictures which only hint at the glory. The clouds made it more dramatic, but as the light faded the clouds took control of the night, precluding any astronomical observing.

Mount Graham International Observatories

A couple hours east of Tucson you can find Mount Graham, but you can’t go up it without a permit or signing on with the Eastern Arizona College Discovery Park tour, which is what I did. It takes over an hour to ascend the mountain road with its 108 switchbacks. At the summit are three observatories: the Sub-millimeter Radio Telescope, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, and the Large Binocular Telescope. We toured all three. Meanwhile, the weather degraded from mostly sunny to socked in, foggy, and 25-30 mph winds. The monsoon is real. I’m sure it had nothing to do with me being there.

Lowell Observatory

I traveled by car from Tucson to Flagstaff to see the Lowell Observatory, about a 4-hour drive. It saved me some logistical nightmares of getting there by train. Lowell is a beautiful facility, and they do very nice interpretive work. They also do public observing every clear night, and we happened to get such a thing while I was there. Lowell, named for famed astronomer Percival Lowell, is where Clyde Thombaugh discovered Pluto.

California

California Science Center

Not an observatory, but a cool science museum that has lots of space artifacts including the space shuttle Endeavor.

Griffith Observatory

Sitting on a hill overlooking Los Angeles is Griffith Observatory, named for Griffith Griffith. Yep, that was his name. This facility has been an important center for science education in L.A. for generations. It’s still very cool. They do public observing through their 12-inch Zeiss every clear night, despite the atrocious light pollution. You still get a decent view of the planets, which can be a real Gee-Whiz! moment, especially for the uninitiated.

Palomar Observatory

The Big Eye, that is the 200″ Hale reflector, one of the most famous telescopes in the world, is housed in this beautiful, Art Deco observatory dome. If you ever see an observatory in a cartoon, it’s probably based on Palomar. It is still among the largest telescopes in active service, and this is an active scientific facility. A couple hours southeast of Los Angeles, actually closer to San Diego, Palomar doesn’t suffer too much from pollution of the bright lights, big city. They have nice gift shop and visitor center and a good tour.

Mount Wilson Observatory

Mount Wilson was one of the first great observatories on the West Coast, developed by George Hale, the man behind Yerkes and (eventually) Palomar. It’s about an hour and change northeast of Los Angeles and is home to several former claimants of World’s Largest Telescope. Now primarily an educational outreach facility and center for outdoor activities like hiking and mountain biking, Mt. Wilson played a key roll in changing the way we understand the shape, structure, size, and age of the Universe.

New Mexico

Molly flew out to join me in Albuquerque 32 days after I boarded the train in Harpers Ferry. We spent a day doing a self-guided Breaking Bad tour, which you can look here at if you’re into the show. We also enjoyed the New Mexico Space History Museum, the White Sands National Monument, the Three Rivers Petroglyph park, and the Valley of Fires lava flow site. Again, if you are interested in these, feel free to click on over. I’m going to keep the major bullet points for the official Grand Tour sites, such as…

Sunspot and Apache Point Observatories

Up on a mountain overlooking Alamogordo and White Sands, near the town of Cloudcroft, and just down the way from Mayhill where I spent a week on my last sabbatical, you can find Sunspot, the national solar observatory. You might have heard about Sunspot in the news recently. It was closed and evacuated by the FBI three days before we got there, leading to all sorts of speculation and conspiracy theories. Turned out to be a criminal investigation of a janitor involved in child porn, and definitely not aliens. Gross. Any way, just around the corner is Apache Point, an active observatory that is home to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an important digital, 3-D map of stars and celestial objects that revolutionized the field about the turn of the century. No visitor center, gift shop, or tours, but the public is welcome to stroll around. So we did.

Monastery of Christ in the Desert

This is the bookend retreat for the sabbatical, balancing the week at the Sienna Center in Wisconsin. Molly and I spent three days and three nights with the Benedictine brotherhood at this monastery on the Chama River near Abiquiu, NM. It is a beautiful and remote setting. Most of the time was spent in silence, or a close facsimile, and we attended quite a few of the services of the hours. The brothers start their day with Vigils at 3:30 a.m. and Lauds at 5:00 a.m., and we managed to miss those somehow. We very much enjoyed our time in reflection there, and the night sky was incredible.

Moon Over the Monastery

Here are many repetitive pictures of the moon, Venus, Jupiter, and friends low over the mountains west of the monastery on two successive nights.

Acoma Sky City Pueblo

Molly’s mom joined us from Colorado when we returned from the monastery to Albuquerque. We spent a day at the Acoma Pueblo, about an hour west of ABQ. I had been planning to go to the Chaco Canyon Native American Heritage site, which is the remains of a very large community dating from about 800-1200 AD in northwestern New Mexico. Chaco shows a great deal of intricate astronomical knowledge built into the layout and architecture of the entire site. Unfortunately, the logistics of travel precluded getting everywhere I hoped to go, and Chaco fell off the list. Sky City was much more doable and turned out to be a fascinating side trip. The Acoma are thought to be descendants of the Chaco people.

The Very Large Array

The last of the Grand Tour observatories, the Very Large Array, is a bookend to the first observatory on my sabbatical, Green Bank. The VLA is the largest radio observatory in the world, a collection of 27 radio dishes, each 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter, set in a Y pattern with a 22-mile diameter. It is well known from Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos series and the Jodie Foster movie (based on a book by Sagan), Contact. Once again, radio astronomy proved to be absolutely fascinating, not only to me, but also to Molly and Mom who were both quite impressed. Good tour, good visitor center, nice gift shop.

And that’s pretty much it!

We spent a couple days with Mom at her place in northern Colorado, after which we took the train from Denver home to Harpers Ferry. I have some pics of the trip home here. I still have a couple places I want to get to in and around DC, but time is running out to get it in under the title “sabbatical.” Like I said, I hope to post more about the journey, things I learned, ideas I’ve pondered, observations I’ve made about life, the universe, and everything, so stay tuned.

Not Quite an Observatory: The University of Arizona Mirror Lab

My first tour in Arizona was the >University of Arizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab<, and you can see my pictures and comments at >this link.<

By this point I was becoming aware of the number of places I was visiting that pushed the limits of technology, knowledge, and skill for the sake of science. The Yerkes 40″ is the physical limit for refracting telescopes. LIGO is the most precise measuring instrument ever built. At this lab they craft mirrors that are smooth to one one-millionth of an inch. Such things are staggering to contemplate, at least for me.

While this isn’t an observatory, this lab is making observatories possible. They are making mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile, and they made the mirrors for the two optical telescopes on Mount Graham, which we will get to in a couple posts. >Here is a link< to a time lapse video, taken from inside the kiln, of the glass melting in the making of one of the mirrors. As far as I know, this is the only place doing work like this. There are other mirror labs, but nothing making mirrors this big.

This is also about the time I brought to consciousness a thought I’d had when I was in college working in a wind tunnel lab. Science smells like oil. We tend to think of science as being clean and pristine and airtight, or at least I do, but when you go to these facilities, the labs and the observatories, they smell industrial and oily. Big science in the real world, not your classroom stuff, is much more earthy than we see in the movies, with lubrication, and metalwork, and miles of wire, and countless boxes and drawers of spare parts. It’s not all theory and math and formulas. You need those, of course, but then you have to make them work in physical space.

That’s part of why I think we should focus much more on science, and space science especially, as a national economic priority. Science needs all manner of workers to make it happen. You need theorists, sure, but also technicians and skilled labor to put the parts together; fabricators, tool and die makers, welders and builders making the parts and things that hold the parts; construction workers building the work places and labs; plumbers, electricians, and painters to make the spaces workable; maintenance crews to keep it all in shape; administrators and clerical workers to organize it all; then you have to feed all those folks and provide housing and retail for them. Every big science project should mean work for hundreds or thousands of people with all manner of skills and all for the betterment of humanity. Decent work for decent wages should mean better opportunity and improved economic justice in communities. Better work and pay should mean decreased crime and need for social services. I know I’m an idealist, but am I missing something here?

But I digress. Here they make mirrors the size of swimming pools so we can see the farthest stars.

Observatory 6: LIGO

I’ve been keeping up better with recording my journey with my photos, which are now living at my Google account since I have an Android phone. Say what you will about the evil digital empires, it is convenient.

Any way, going way back to Louisiana and the LIGO facility, you can see my pictures and comments at >this link.<

Short form: >LIGO< stands for Laser Interferometry Gravitational wave Observatory, which consists of two campuses, one in Hanford, WA, and the other in Livingston, LA, where I went. It is an instrument that measures the distortion of spacetime by waves created by the interaction of supermassive bodies like neutron stars and black holes. It is a whole new way of looking at the universe, it is incredibly precise, and it is remarkably expensive. New technology is like that. We don’t know yet what the practical applications of all this will be, but I bet it will be cool.

LIGO Livingston is open to the public one day a month through their educational center. They have a very good collection of interactive displays aimed at kids and novices to help explain the science they do there. The staff are knowledgeable and friendly. Tours don’t really show you much of the actual instrument, as it is pretty inaccessible being encased in evacuated steel tubes surrounded by evacuated concrete tunnels. So you get to see the control room and the outside of the tunnels and a prototype of some of the pieces of the instrument. But somehow, that was adequate for me.

It is mind bending to think about waves in spacetime. They aren’t waves inside space but space itself waving. That means when the waves pass over the earth, the whole planet, your home, your chair, your body are all stretched and squeezed. You don’t notice because the effect is minuscule, but it happens nevertheless.

The universe is a weirder place than you would imagine.