Good Morning

It is morning, right? Close enough. After a long night (in bed at 5am), we all got some needed sleep, and woke up this afternoon to....clouds. Let's just hope they move out of the area by this evening. I thought I'd spend some time this afternoon talking about Kitt Peak, and, more importantly, showing you around our facility. Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is located 56 miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona. It is at an elevation of ~6800 ft, and there are over 20 telescopes on the summit. KPNO has been contributing to astronomy and astrophysics since 1958.

...No, the dome stairs aren't creepy at 3am.




For three nights, we're operating the 0.9m (36") WIYN telescope, which was actually the first (1960) major telescope to be operational at KPNO. We operate from a [heated!] control room downstairs from the dome, scope, and camera assembly. That's it on the right, relaxing during the afternoon. The camera assembly is the jumble of cables, wiring, and such mounted underneath the telescope. The camera is called Mosaic, and it's a compilation of 8 CCDs matched up into one giant imaging sensor, 8192 pixels on a side, 64 Megapixels in all.







The black oval-ish casing around it holds all the different filters we use, and they rotate around into position above the sensors when we're ready to use them. The silver cylinder (the "Dewar") in the center holds the CCDs, along with the liquid nitrogen needed to chill them to -100 degrees Celsius. (Definitively colder than a Wisconsin winter!) We need the sensors to be super cold in order to minimize noise in our images. When taking pictures of extremely faint objects in space, any stray signal can disrupt the image. Keeping things very, very cold helps the electronics operate with minimal noise.