Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Astronomy in the Desert!
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1111/
Description: Space scoop, news for children
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is:
Astronomy in the Desert!
Professional astronomers have powerful telescopes that can take amazing pictures of the Universe.
But to get the most out of the telescopes, they have to think carefully about where they put them on Earth. The best places to use telescopes have clear skies without any clouds.
They’re also far away from cities, as the glow of streetlights makes it harder to see the night sky – astronomers call this ‘light pollution’. The city’s lights illuminate the dust in our atmosphere the way the Sun does in the daytime, just to a lesser extent.
That’s why you see more stars when you head away from cities and go out into the countryside, because there is less light pollution.
A desert is a remote place away from the light pollution of cities that also has very few clouds in the sky. So it’s the perfect location for astronomers to observe the Universe.
In the Atacama desert, in Chile, there is already a big family of telescopes. And in 2011 this family got a new member: a 2.6 meter wide telescope called the VST.
By the way, this is a “recursive initialism” where one of the letters in the VST initialism, the “V”, stands for another initialism, in this case VLT, which in its turn stands for the Very Large Telescope. So VST is the VLT Survey Telescope.
And these are initialisms because we say VLT and VST, not “velt” or “visst” you see.
Now where was I? Oh yeah!
The VLT is a group of 4 8.2 meter telescopes operated by the ESO at Paranal Observatory. There are also 4 1.8 meter auxiliary telescopes called ATs, that are moveable.
So this one mountaintop has 9 large telescopes on it!
In addition to that, 1 mile away from Paranal’s main complex is the VISTA Telescope, which stands for the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. It’s a 4.1 meter telescope that has a 67 million pixel infrared camera on it.
In addition to that, 13 1/2 miles away, on neighboring Cerro Armazones, the ESO is building the EELT, the European Extremely Large Telescope. This puppy will be 39.3 meters across! Extremely large indeed!
Each telescope in the Paranal family has a different task. While VISTA works in near-infrared light, the VST was built to take wide field panoramic pictures in visible light. Each of these telescopes photographs big chunks of the night sky.
So VST and VISTA will act like bird dogs, alerting the hunters where to look for their quarry!
For example, the photo in today’s album artwork of a massive cloud of gas and dust in space, which is called Messier 17, the Swan Nebula, has been captured in a single picture!
It’s common enough for amateur astronomers like myself to take a single picture of the Swan Nebula, but my DSLR is rather outclassed by the camera used here.
This image was taken with the OmegaCAM camera on the VST. This camera has 32 CCD detector chips that all together produce 268 megapixel images!
The desert here is very dry, and the sky is very nearly cloudless. There are over 340 clear nights a year! And with the observatory being 8,645 feet above sea level, there isn’t very much atmosphere above you to mess up the viewing!
Hey Here’s a Cool Fact
There is a telescope in Antarctica at the South Pole! Antarctica is a cold desert and it’s the driest place on Earth, with some parts of it not having rainfall for more than two million years!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. Audio post-production by Richard Drumm. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. This year we will celebrate more discoveries and stories from the universe. Join us and share your story. Until tomorrow! Goodbye!