Observatory anniversary

Observatory upgrades planned as 40th anniversary arrives

by Susan Griffith

Imagine tapping into the World Wide Web in Topeka, Kansas, and viewing images of space from a telescope on the highest hill in Geauga County, Ohio.

This will be possible after completion of a $175,000 project at Nassau Astronomical Station, which houses one of three telescopes in CWRU's Warner and Swasey Observatory.

The effort to refurbish the facility and install new equipment there over the next year will transform the manually operated reflecting telescope into a robot. The project will allow CWRU stargazers, as well as Internet users around the world, to access the telescope.

The site also will become one of only two robotic facilities in the world with spectroscopic capabilities. Spectroscopy enables determining a star's velocity, temperature, and metal content.

"Actually, it will be the only one [on Earth]," said Earle Luck, chair of CWRU's Department of Astronomy and director of the observatory. The other is the space-based Hubble Telescope.

The Nassau Station celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The University community can view the changes in progress during the annual open house at 7:30 p.m. Friday, October 10. (In case of clouds or rain, October 11 is the backup date.)

astronomy department file photo

The Nassau Astronomical Station (as viewed when built in 1957) will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year. An October 10 open house will give the public an opportunity to use the station's 0.9-meter reflecting telescope.

Reservations are required to attend the open house. Contact Linda Day at 368-3728 or lmd3. Historical information on the astronomy department's observatories is available on the Web at http://astrwww.astr.cwru.edu/hist.html.

The dome is located on 300 acres of wooded land at the highest point in Geauga County, with an elevation of 1,300 feet. To reach the dome at 10317 Clay Street, travel east on Mayfield Road past the City of Chardon, then travel three miles north on Clay Street.

In the 1950s, sky conditions at the observatory's original Taylor Road site in East Cleveland had degraded to such a point that research on the Burrell Schmidt telescope there could no longer be supported.

Jason Nassau, the former chair and director of the observatory, received funding for land and a new dome in Geauga County to house the Burrell Schmidt telescope. Support came from the Cleveland Foundation, National Science Foundation, and others with an interest in astronomy.

In the 1970s, the University moved the Burrell Schmidt telescope to Kitt Peak, outside Tucson, Arizona, a site that operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

When the Burrell Schmidt telescope moved to Geauga County, a new 0.9 meter reflector replaced it on Taylor Road. The reflector moved to Geauga County when the Burrell Schmidt telescope relocated to Arizona.

Until recently, CWRU had an agreement with NOAO to allocate partial use of the Burrell Schmidt telescope at Kitt Peak as a national facility. Recent cutbacks in national science funding closed some of the telescopes, including CWRU's, which now reverts to University use only. Other telescopes will close in the future.

Luck said his department is upgrading the Burrell Schmidt telescope and installing a charged couple device (CCD), a detector system similar to those used in commercial video cameras.

Because many astronomers have lost use of these national telescopes at Kitt Peak, Luck said astronomy departments around the country began looking at ways to bring their older and less productive telescopes back into research use.

Since the Taylor Road dome closed and the 0.9 meter reflector moved to Geauga County, the Nassau Station has basically been unused since 1982, except for public viewings several times a year.

Upgrades to the Nassau Station include a new direct imaging CCD system and a new spectrograph. Light collected by the telescope will be relayed via fiber optics to the spectrograph housed in a room below the dome.

Luck is designing the spectrograph with the assistance of Astronomical Consultants and Equipment Inc. of Tucson. It will have an optical bench with mirrors and lenses similar to the ones physicists use in laser optics. An environmentally controlled room is being built to house the spectrograph.

The department also had to establish a small weather station. It will have a small telescope pointed at Polaris, the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor, to determine the quality of the sky for viewing. The weather telescope will relay this information to computers which control the reflector.

Plans are also under way to use the Nassau Station as a learning site for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Hands-On Universe. The department will have all the equipment in place in late 1998, and hopefully six months after that all systems will be integrated and ready to work with the program.

The Hands-On Universe program uses astronomy to teach science and math to middle and high school students. CWRU's Department of Astronomy will join a collaboration of telescopes in Hawaii, Illinois, California, Washington, Sweden, and Australia in the program.

In addition to the Nassau Station and Kitt Peak, CWRU's Geauga County observatory also operates a Warner and Swasey telescope in a dome on the roof of the Smith Building, which houses the Department of Astronomy. Any CWRU staff, faculty, or student can receive training to use this telescope.