The air at the top of Kitt Peak in Tucson, Arizona, is thin and clear, perfect for star gazing -- which is why the Kitt Peak National Observatory is located there. Now the view of the heavens is equally good from Yale, thanks to a recently constructed remote viewing room that is linked to the observatory's $13.4 million WIYN telescope, allowing Yale astronomers to study the stars and galaxies without leaving the campus.
"When we demonstrated the remote link recently to graduate students, we could see education happening in the room," says associate professor Charles Bailyn, who has been in charge of hardware and software adaptations for viewing via the Internet. "The quality of the images makes classroom lectures become real. Even undergraduate students will have access to the telescope, which produces some of the best images of space available from the earth's surface, surpassed only by the Hubble Space Telescope."
The WIYN telescope, which was built in 1994, is co-owned by Yale, Wisconsin and Indiana universities along with the Tucson- based National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO). The three universities paid construction costs in return for 60 percent of the observing time. NOAO provided the primary mirror and agreed to pay operations costs for the first 15 years - estimated at $16.6 million - in exchange for 40 percent of the telescope time, which is shared by the U.S. astronomical community.
Yale's remote viewing room, located in Rm. 204 of Josiah Willard Gibbs Research Laboratories at 260 Whitney Ave., cost about $10,000 to equip, Professor Bailyn says. It was made possible by a gift from Michael D. Silverman, a member of the Yale College Class of 1968 and president of The Jaydor Corp. of Millburn, New Jersey.
Having substantial viewing time on the telescope has been a tremendous boon to Yale researchers, Professor Bailyn says. The viewing room will further enhance the telescope's usefulness as a research tool by saving time and travel expenses, and will enhance teaching by making it possible for students to learn from direct observations.
"It's not as good as being there, but it's close," says the Yale astronomer. "We are still in the process of trying to find out what the differences are when we operate the telescope from here, and exploring ways to speed up the data transmission."
Remote viewing required no fancy hardware -- just two Sun workstations that undergraduate students use for other projects during the day. Creating the software, however, took a lot of hard work, says Professor Bailyn, who uses the telescope to study binary star systems for signs of black holes.
Each workstation can display five or six data screens at a time -- the same data and images seen in the WIYN control booth. An Internet audio link with WIYN personnel saves the cost of long- distance phone calls, and a Progressive Image Transmission system makes it possible to interrupt at any point during the 20-minute transmission of a single image as soon as the scientist has located relevant features. That system was developed by Jeff Percival at the Space Astrophysics Lab at the University of Wisconsin. Galaxies at-a-glance
The WIYN telescope, which is the second largest on Kitt Peak, features several technological breakthroughs for preventing mirror distortion, as well as a fiberoptic system that enables astronomers to view as many as 100 stars or galaxies at a time. Its location adjacent to the first research telescope built on Kitt Peak is thought to provide the best observing conditions on the mountain, where a dozen telescopes are clustered to take advantage of clear desert skies and a low level of light pollution from nearby towns.
Yale scientists can do everything from the remote viewing room except move the 40-ton device into position -- a task entrusted only to a technician in Arizona. It will soon be possible to remotely operate the telescope's spectrographs, which break light from stars and galaxies into its component wavelengths for analysis of an object's chemical composition as well as its distance and speed. An infrared camera to monitor cloud cover above the telescope will provide another important link.
Because of its design and thermal-control system, the telescope is kept at nearly the same temperature as surrounding air, which means both the surface of the 3.5-meter mirror and the light path are less distorted by expansion or contraction caused by pockets of warmer or cooler air. The telescope also features an active optics system that monitors the shape of the mirror as the telescope changes positions, correcting for any distortions introduced by gravity. These features allow WIYN to take much better advantage of the excellent viewing conditions on Kitt Peak than older telescopes can, Professor Bailyn says.
Yale astronomy research projects include:
An archive of recent images from the WIYN telescope can be viewed on the World Wide Web at the address: http://www.noao.edu.
Yale University, which receives 17 percent of the WIYN telescope's viewing time, also has two telescopes in the southern hemisphere: a 1-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo, Chile, and a smaller telescope at the Yale Southern Observatory in El Leoncito, Argentina, used solely to map long-term changes in star positions as viewed from the southern hemisphere. An agreement also is also being forged for use of a telescope in Venezuela.
The NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.