Telescope Time
I applied for some telescope time at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) and was very happy to find out I got the time. We’ll be looking at the mysterious star I’ve talked about on this blog often, GSC 3196-641. We have 6 nights in August, so I should have more to report then.
The telescope I’ll be using is the 1.2m McKellar telescope. We’ll be doing spectroscopy of the star throughout its 18 hour period.
As a side note, governments and institutions around the world are decommissioning telescopes of this size more and more often. They think because we have 10m telescopes that we shouldn’t “waste” money on these 1m to 3m telescopes. I could not disagree more. Astronomers have this stupid idea that the only things we can learn are way out at the edge of what we can detect. Then something like exoplanets comes along and suddenly we are looking at bright, nearby stars. Good thing we kept a few “smaller” scopes around.
The DAO is one of the few facilities I’m aware of that really makes it easy for amateurs to get time on bigger scopes with spectrometers. I am very grateful to them and the Canadian government for allowing me to do this work.
Sunday, July 8, 2007