Keeping Their Eyes on the Skies
By Terry Devitt '78, MA'85

Photo copyright WIYN/NOAO/NSF

For those who study the mysteries of the universe, every minute of telescope time translates into light-years of information.

On a clear night, you can see forever from Kitt Peak, a desert mountaintop in Arizona. But this October night isn't clear, and the man peering through one of the finest optical telescopes in the world struggles to see a measly few thousand light years.

Perched at a bank of computer terminals and video monitors, D.J. Pisano MS'98 and his compatriots sweat out the sole astronomical observation they will make tonight with a telescope that is a marvel of modern ground-based astronomy. Amid the rain, hail, lightning, and fog — when a hole finally appears in the hat of clouds over the mountain — Pisano, graduate student Elizabeth Hedrick, and telescope operator Charles Corson together eke out a single spectrum, a rainbow of starlight that, when digitized, processed, and dissected, can hint at the secrets of the cosmos. It is, they agree, slim astronomical pickings, but it's better than nothing.

"I don't know if there's ever been a time when I've come down here and gotten absolutely nothing," muses Pisano, a UW-Madison graduate student who, at twenty-six, has a dozen observing runs under his belt. But as he glances at a monitor that shows a real-time weather satellite image of the western United States, the only clouds in view are directly over the seven-thousand-foot-high Kitt Peak, a once-remote mountaintop about forty miles west of Tucson that is home to one of the largest collections of telescopes in the world. Operated by the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO) on behalf of the National Science Foundation, Kitt Peak is cold, clear, and relatively free of light pollution. Despite encroaching civilization, it provides astronomers with some of the best observing conditions in North America.

To remain a player in the increasingly competitive universe of astronomy and astrophysics, it is essential to have direct access to big telescopes such as those housed on Kitt Peak. In short, telescope time is the coin of the realm in the context of modern observational astronomy. Being without it is like being a chemist or biologist without a laboratory. Without your own window to the heavens, opportunities for discovery are greatly diminished, and attracting the best graduate students is next to impossible.

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