Date: December 16, 2011
Title: The WIYN Observatory
Podcaster: Rob Sparks
Organization: National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO)
Links: http://www.noao.edu http://twitter.com/#!/NOAONorth
www.facebook.com/USNOAO
Description: The WIYN Observatory is owned and operated by the WIYN Consortium, which consists of the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, Yale University, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). This partnership between public and private universities and NOAO is the first of its kind. The universities benefit from access to a well-run observatory at an excellent site, and the larger astronomical community served by NOAO benefits from the addition of this large, state-of-the-art telescope to Kitt Peak’s array of telescopes. In this podcast, WIYN Observatory Director Pat Knezek talks about the history of the observatory and some exciting new instruments that will soon be installed on the telescopes.
Bio: Rob Sparks is a science education specialist in the EPO group at NOAO and works on the Galileoscope project (www.galileoscope.org), providing design, dissemination and professional development. He also blogs at halfastro.wordpress.com.
Patricia Knezek obtained her undergraduate degree in Astronomy from the University of Texas, Austinand her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on the role that star formation plays in the formation and evolution of galaxies, using nearby galaxies that have formed few stars as analogs to galaxies that are just beginning to form stars at high redshift. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, after which she conducted research as a scientist at Carnegie Institute of Washington followed by The Johns Hopkins University. In 1999 she joined the Space Telescope Science Institute as a member of the scientific team designing and developing Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was deployed on the Hubble Space Telescope during the last servicing mission. In 2001 she was hired by WIYN Consortium, Inc. (WIYN), which runs two telescopes on Kitt Peak mountain outside of Tucson, Arizona, to oversee their instrumentation program. She was promoted to Deputy Director of the Consortium in 2005, and to Director in 2011. While she is Director at WIYN, she is also a full Scientist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).
Sponsors: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is brought to you by the Physics Department at Eastern Illinois University: “Caring faculty guiding students through teaching and research” at www.eiu.edu/~physics/.
This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has also been brought to you by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. NOAO is a US national research and development center for ground-based nighttime astronomy. We provide astronomers access to world-class observing facilities on a peer-reviewed basis. Our mission is to engage in programs to develop the next generation of telescopes, instruments, and software tools necessary to enable exploration and investigation through the observable Universe. For information on observing proposals or our public programs, please visit www.noao.edu for more information.
Transcript:
Rob: Hi, this is Rob Sparks of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson and I would like to welcome you to this episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. Today I have Pat Knezak here from the WIYN Observatory. Good morning, Pat.
Pat: Good morning, how are you?
Rob: Good, how about you?
Pat: I am doing well.
Rob: First, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Pat: Sure, so I am originally from Tucson, I was born here.
Rob: Wow! A native!
Pat: A native! Especially back then, there weren’t that many natives. But I grew up in Michigan, my dad was a professor at Michigan State University. I got my undergrad degree at the University of Texas at Austin, my PHD at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I did a post-doc at the University of Michigan, go Wolverines and then subsequently moved around quite a bit. I was in Chile for several years working for Las Campanas Observatory which is owned by Carnegie. Then I was in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins and then Space Telescope working for the Hubble Space Telescope and then I moved here in 2001 and have been with the WIYN Observatory and the Optical Astronomy Observatory ever since.
Rob: And now you are Director of the WIYN Observatory.
Pat: And now I am director of the WIYN Observatory.
Rob: First of all, could you tell us a little about the WIYN Observatory, and I should say that is “W-I-Y-N” Observatory and the telescopes that they run.
Pat: So WIYN Observatory consists of two telescopes on Kitt Peak Mountain where there are also the National Optical Astronomy Observatory Teledcopes. One is 3.5 meters and the other is 0.9 meters. We started with the 3.5 meter and WIYN is a unique organization. It was the first public-private partnership between between the National Science Foundation, through NOAO and private Universities: Wisconsin, that’s the W, Indiana University, that’s the I, and Yale University, that’s the Y.
Rob: And NOAO is the N.
Pat: And NOAO is the N, very good. And so NOAO owns 40% of the telescope and Wisconsin owns 26% and then Indiana and Yale each have 17%. So this was an opportunity to build a state of the art telescope where the entire community has access through NOAO and Wisconsin, Indiana and Yale have access through their portion of the telescope that they pay for maintenance and operations. The 0.9meter actually was already on the mountain and NOAO was no longer interested in running it so we decided to take it over. It has a broader group of membership including smaller universities like Haverford College and the University of Wisconsin-Milwuakee and offers opportunities for a number of small colleges, such as Austin-Peay State University, to have their students get a real life observing experience when they are undergraduates and also let the faculty get some research time on a national facility.
Rob: So what types of instruments and capabilities do these particular telescopes have at this time.
Pat: So the 3.5 meter telescope, we actually have a suite of instruments and its one of the few telescopes in the world that allow you to have multiple instruments mounted at one time so you could use more than one instrument in a night.
Rob: Yeah, that’s a pretty neat system they have up there.
Pat: It is, it’s a very neat system. And the system that I just mentioned, a plug for WIYN, the type of telescope that WIYN is with the capability of having more than one instrument mounted at a time is sort of the springboard, it was the first one built before the larger aperture telescopes like Gemini and Keck. They are all the same basic concept, but WIYN is the first one actually built, it was the test bed. So we have an optical imager that can take pictures like your CCD camera. We have a near infrared imager for those of you who are familiar with the infrared, the longer wavelengths of light allow you to take pictures like if you have ever seen the night time goggles that are used by the Air Force and so forth. We also have several spectrographs, they are the instruments that can split light into its constituent elements to look for things like helium and copper and so forth.
Rob: Including one that does multi-fiber, right?
Pat: That’s right. So it allows you to look at almost 100 objects simultaneously on the sky, which is very nice. That’s called HYDRA for any of you who know your mythology.
Rob: Yeah, I love the name.
Pat: Yeah, and on the 0.9 meter we have an optical imager at this time so it is for people to take pictures, visible light pictures like you see in cameras and so forth.
Rob: And the 0.9 meter has taken the images that are on a lot of the posters we have floating around. It’s a great imaging telescope.
Pat: That’s right. And it’s been the Astronomy Picture of the Day many times too.
Rob: So what types of research are currently done on these scopes with these instruments?
Pat: We do the gamut of research. Anything from looking for planets, and in fact WIY was one of the follow up telescopes for the Kepler mission, so for those people who know about Kepler and that it’s looking at a particular piece of the sky to try and find Earth-sized planets, we are doing active follow up to try and determine the different types of planets orbiting stars.
Rob: There have been a couple of big press releases about that recently, havent’ there?
Pat: There have. And then one of the other programs we did recently is, there was a supernova that went off in August and this was the closest known Type 1a supernova, the kind of supernova used to get distances to very far away objects in the universe, and we actively followed up for the next three months almost ever night, every clear night. And this goes back to when I was talking about WIYN earlier, the fact that we can have more than one instrument mounted at a time allows us to do this. Most telescopes you can’t have a campaign where you do something every single night because you are switching between instruments over a period of time.
Rob: And with most telescopes you have to take one instrument off and then mount the other one.
Pat; That’s right. So we were doing it in the near infrared and we actually were able to keep the near infrared camera on and we took data every single night until we couldn’t take data anymore because it got too low in the sky. We also do programs on galactic structure, looking at galaxies outside of our own, looking for black holes using the HYDRA spectrograph, it runs the gamut.
Rob: So it’s a very versatile instrument.
Pat: Yeah, the telescope is very versatile and one of the nice things is about it and the 0.9 meters is that because we have these university partnerships, a lot of students use our telescopes and a lot of theses are done on our telescopes. So you will often find if you look at the press released that come out or the papers that are published, the students are the ones that are doing the work on it.
Rob: I have run into lots of students when I have visited up there. I understand that we have some great new instruments coming down the line in the not too distant future that will really increase the abilities of these scopes.
Pat: That’s right. On our big telescope, the 3.5 meters, we have what we call the One Degree Imager coming down. This particular telescope has the ability to look at one square degree in the sky at a time. If you think about that, that’s four full Moons. So we can look at the size of four full Moons all in one shot which is very rare for telescopes. This particular camera that is coming downstream hopefully within the next couple of year, actually we plan to deploy the first part of it next summer has state of the art technology for our CCD cameras. So it allows us to get the best possible quality data and it allows you to go very deep which means you can see very faint which means you can see things that are very far away. So that’s extremely exciting and then we are trying to do something similar on our 0.9 meter telescope and have a new camera that’s coming on it in about the same time frame and that’s going to be a half degree imager so it can see half the size of the field of view and the nice thing about that is that both of these state of the art instruments, anyone in the astronomical community can propose to observe with and many students will be using.
Rob: That sounds great. Thank you very much for joining me this morning, Pat.
Pat: Your welcome. It was a pleasure.
Rob: This is Rob Sparks and Pat Knezak for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. Thanks for listening and we will talk to you again in January.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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