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

WIYN provides a hands-on experience that is rare for graduate students anywhere, says Pisano. "The problem with modern telescopes is you're often disconnected from getting your data," he explains. "We're becoming remote from the process. Many observatories now have automated data collection. You put in a request (for an observation), and you get a tape with your data on it. WIYN is unique in that you have the ability to do both. It's a fantastic training ground for a graduate student."

Pisano's colleague on this trip is Elizabeth Hedrick. This is her first visit, her get-acquainted experience with both the telescope and Kitt Peak. There are many new things to soak in about the complicated machinations and the routine of a state-of-the-art observatory. On a corner shelf in the control room is a small air horn. Its ostensible purpose is to scare off the occasional mountain lion. Its true purpose, more likely, is to raise the comfort level of astronomers who must walk from building to building in total darkness when mountain lions are known to be in the neighborhood. Other native hazards include scorpions, rattlesnakes, skunks, and poisonous centipedes, all of which sometimes share the observatory with the humans who work there.

Telescope operator and site engineer Charles Corson calls the shots in the observatory. His job is to find the guide star, point the telescope, and usher objects of interest into its cross hairs. It is also his job to look after the welfare of the $14 million observatory. His is the deciding voice if conditions of lightning, wind, or humidity threaten the telescope or its instruments.

Corson has been working on the mountain since 1994. He is clearly fond of WIYN and has made the control room, with its small kitchen and superb stereo system, a comfortable mountaintop aerie from which to direct the operations of the telescope. When he's not at the controls, he's fussing over the delicate instruments at the receiving end of the starlight captured by the telescope, or tending any of the myriad mechanical and computer systems that make the observatory work.

WIYN and the 4-meter, he notes, are the biggest optical research telescopes on Kitt Peak. But the mountain's many smaller domes, and its pioneering solar telescope, remain active. One of Kitt Peak's workhorse telescopes, the 0.9-meter located next door to the WIYN Observatory, was recently taken over by the WIYN consortium. It promises increased access to the sky for UW-Madison astronomers and their colleagues at three UW System schools: UW-Oshkosh, UW-Stevens Point, and UW-Whitewater.

Although WIYN's current configuration gives astronomers and their students an unprecedented view of the stars from one of the best perches in the continental U.S., the telescope must continually evolve to remain a front-line tool of science. Toward that end, instruments and cameras must be upgraded and new tools added. Planning for an elegant new camera known as the One Degree Imager is under way, according to George Jacoby, director of the WIYN Observatory.

Jacoby, partnering with University of Hawaii Professor John Tonry, will apply new light-detection technology to help the telescope compensate for the apparent jitter of stars as their light passes through the turbulent atmosphere. Such a radical new camera promises to help astronomers overcome the distortion of light by our atmosphere, a problem previously addressed by lofting telescopes into space.

But with WIYN today, the universe is still remarkably accessible from this small mountain in the middle of the Arizona desert. The secrets of the stars come tumbling down, and the next generation of astronomers still has the chance to climb the mountain that leads to the heavens.

Terry Devitt '78, MA'85 is research communications director for University Communications. He has been writing about Wisconsin science for twenty years, despite having been scared in utero by someone in a lab coat.

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