When it comes to studying the stars, what matters on Earth is location, location, location.
Northwestern’s Dearborn Observatory has two problems that keep it from being used to conduct research with its telescope: bad weather and light pollution.
The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, on the other hand, recently received a $2.3 million contract to build the main mirror for the new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will be used to study dark matter and watch for near-Earth asteroids.
“It’s a bit depressing being an astronomer … if you compare the number of clear nights, we just can’t compete,” said Michael Smutko, lecturer of physics and astronomy who manages operations at Dearborn.
Smutko said there are several problems with Dearborn’s location.
“One is the weather of Chicago,” he said. “The other is that we’re in a suburb and there’s a lot of light pollution. One needs to go to Arizona or Hawaii or Chile where the skies are clear.
“If you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a telescope, would you put it in a place like Chicago or in a place where you can observe 350 nights a year?”
Students at NU said they don’t mind that the Dearborn telescope is much less powerful than the new device Arizona is helping to build.
Cloudy weather stopped Weinberg junior Laura Dunn from seeing anything the night she went to Dearborn, but she still found the telescope remarkable.
“I don’t know much about the sciences, but I think it’s a pretty amazing, large telescope,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a competition to have the best telescope in the world.”
Little research occurs with the Dearborn telescope, but Smutko praised its historical significance. The telescope’s main lens was built in the 1800s and is of such high quality that it is still used today, he said.
Smutko said the Dearborn telescope was the biggest in the world for many years, and it still is among the biggest in the Midwest available to the public today.
He said Dearborn is “a fantastic training school” for NU students to prepare for work with larger telescopes.
“We can see thousands and thousands of asteroids. The problem is all the easy, bright objects have already been studied,” he said.
Arizona’s astronomy department and Steward Observatory are helping to construct or operate 14 other ground telescopes besides the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and five space telescopes, according to the department’s Web site. The ground telescopes are placed on mountains, away from city lights.
Peter Strittmatter, the director of Steward Observatory, said most of the telescopes are used for research by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. One 21-inch diameter telescope is used for education, he said.
“The LSST represents a major step forward to finding very faint objects,” he said. “It is much more sensitive than previous telescopes … there’s nothing like the LSST around. To compare it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges.”
Strittmatter said he wasn’t aware that NU even had an observatory.
Reach Nitesh Srivastava at [email protected].
