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

While the wind whistles outside the WIYN control room, Corson, Pisano, and Hedrick busy themselves with the controls of the telescope and its instruments. Even without a clear sky, there is work to be done. The telescope must be ready at a moment's notice, its instruments calibrated, mirrors focused, and the observing plan continually updated as the sky changes over a spinning Earth. Every minute is precious, and if the sky clears, the telescope's operators must be good to go.

Astronomy Professor Eric Wilcots, left, and gaduate student D.J. Pisano beneath the dome of the Washburn Observatory.

One object of interest tonight is IC 1613, a "dwarf irregular galaxy" in the lingo of astronomy. As its name implies, it is a smallish, lopsided galaxy with a few odd features that could help unravel some of the mystery of how galaxies evolve, make new stars, and interact with the space around them. For astronomers, comprehending galaxies and how they work is a part of understanding the big picture of the universe and where we all fit in.

Three days earlier, in a conference room in UW-Madison's Sterling Hall, astronomy professor Eric Wilcots, the architect of the project and Pisano's graduate adviser, laid out tonight's observing plan. Wilcots wants the fifth-year graduate student to use WIYN to get a look at some of IC 1613's oddities — a supernova remnant and some young, extremely hot stars — through a series of five pointings. Given the weather, that will not happen, but even a short glimpse of this nearby galaxy can yield a spectrum that might be worth a thousand pictures.

"It sure looks like this Wolf-Rayet star is blowing a big bubble of ionized gas," Wilcots says as he glances over radio telescope data from the galaxy. "There's a supernova remnant there." The hope, he explains, is to look at the kinematics of the place, to see what effects these stars have on the filaments of ionized gas that are the remains of a star that, sometime in the distant past, flared and exploded, creating a telltale stellar corpse.

Weather notwithstanding, Wilcots predicts that the observations will be tricky because the galaxy is a not-so-distant neighbor of the Milky Way. "I've got this problem where I like nearby galaxies," he says, "which are big when you're observing from this vantage point. And this galaxy is effectively in our back yard."

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