Eye to the Sky

By Christopher Dow • Photography by Tommy LaVergne

It’s just a tiny building, looking like little more than a truncated grain silo, standing alone at the edge of a small parking lot on the north side of campus. But inside it is a window that opens on the universe.

Reginald Dufour checks the telescope’s computerized alignment system.

The window is modest, to be sure, but one that is important to Rice astronomy and astrophysics students. The little silo is the Rice Campus Observatory, and it houses a 16” Meade telescope on a computerized mount.

“I call it ‘Rice’s Eye to the Sky,’” says Reginald Dufour, professor of physics and astronomy and chair of the observatory’s faculty guidance committee. Dufour, who has been at Rice since 1975, can remember the many years when students who needed to make real astronomical observations had only a couple of equally daunting options. For simple viewing, the students could check out one of the department’s smaller, portable telescopes ranging from 4” to 11”. The size is the diameter of the light-collecting concave mirror in the base of the telescope. The larger the mirror, the more light is collected, theoretically increasing the sharpness of the image, though actual viewing also depends on the quality of the telescope’s lenses and other factors.

“These are very elementary telescopes without computer operation,” Dufour says. “We used to set them up on campus rooftops, like the library, but there was trouble with access and people tripping over things at night, so they don’t want students up there now.” Students also could set up the telescopes in parking lots or playing fields or take them out of the city for the night. But wherever the students took them, there remained three problems: the portable telescopes’ low power, their lack of instrumentation, and the difficulty in setting them up. “Setting up a telescope is such a tedious task because you have to align it properly and do a lot of back-and-forth star observing to get everything set right,” Dufour says. “That could take the students hours.”

For more complex viewing than provided by the portable telescopes, students could take the second option of driving to the George Observatory at Brazos Bend State Park, south of Houston, which houses 36”, 20”, and 14” telescopes. The drive made observing an all-night jaunt, and scheduling also could be a problem.

The real solution was to have an observatory with a high-quality telescope right here on campus, and while the possibility was discussed for a number of years, nothing happened until Eugene Levy became Rice’s provost in 2000. “Gene was an astronomer and planetary scientist from Arizona,” Dufour says, “and when he came here, he was a little surprised that we didn’t have an observatory with a permanent telescope, given all of the astronomy courses and labs we had.”

Levy offered to fund the construction of the observatory building from his budget if the department could pay for a telescope, mounting, and instrumentation. The prefab building was constructed in 2002 by ObservaDome, and according to Dufour, it’s a heavy, first-quality dome that can withstand hurricane-force winds. The pier for the telescope mounting was poured separately and isolated from the floor to reduce vibration, and the doors for the telescope slit open horizontally instead of vertically, allowing an unimpeded view. “We can observe almost all the way from horizontal to vertical in any direction, limited only by trees and buildings and such,” Dufour says. “The trees behind the dome are on our north axis, and everything goes around the Pole Star in the north, so we rarely observe anything in the north since everything rises in the east and comes down this way. Actually, we can see almost anything that would be possible to see if we were in a flat, treeless area.”

While construction of the dome was being planned, professor of physics and astronomy Patricia Reiff contacted all the space physics and astronomy alumni and asked them to donate money to purchase a telescope. “We raised about $15,000,” Dufour says, “and I discovered that a colleague of mine in Oregon had this 16" Meade he was willing to sell for that. It was really a bargain basement telescope at $15,000. To get anything better for the same size telescope would cost about $60,000. So for about a quarter of the price of a normal computerized 16" telescope, we got this one.”

The 16" turned out be the perfect size telescope for the campus. “Even though they have a 36" telescope over at the George Observatory,” Dufour says, “the quality of the images on our telescope is far better.” That is due, in part, to the superior optics in the Rice telescope, but interestingly enough, it’s also because of the Rice telescope’s smaller diameter. “With our telescope,” Dufour says, “you’re looking through a smaller beam, so the effects of atmospheric turbulence are less.” Turbulence is the primary reason that image quality degrades, refracting the light from an object and causing it to bounce around and create a blurriness of the image. “I was surprised to find that, generally, the seeing that we have is definitely better than at Brazos Bend,” Dufour says, “even with the larger telescope there.” Another oddity that makes for good viewing from the Rice telescope is the fact that Houston is in a heat dome, and there isn’t as much convection from the ground in the summer as there is in the surrounding countryside, further reducing turbulence. “That, apparently, makes for having images in this telescope that are only a few time worse than its theoretical resolving power,” Dufour says. “We do clearer imagery of planets and satellites than normally they can do at the George, and we can use various filters to filter out the light pollution and things like that.”

But a telescope, in and of itself, is only as useful as the equipment and instrumentation attached to it. The Meade’s computerized mounting not only allows it to track objects as they traverse the sky, but the operator also can give the computer a time, date, and the coordinates of an object, and the telescope automatically will find it. “The telescope’s internal computer has 65,000 objects in its memory banks, or we can use external programs that have something like 30 million objects,” Dufour says. “In fact, the computer has stars that were mapped with the Hubble Space Telescope, and there have been some times when we would actually use the Space Telescope guide stars to find things to image or take spectra of. While our telescope isn’t big, the equipment we have is first-rate, so we can do things with this little telescope that, a decade ago, would have required a telescope 10 times this size.”

Rice can thank amateur astronomer Tom Williams ’76, who earned his PhD working with Albert van Helden in the history of astronomy, for much of that equipment. “Williams donated $25,000 to the observatory so that we could equip it with various instruments,” Dufour says. “We have really first-rate eyepieces, photometers, imaging systems, filters, spectrographs, and CCD [charged coupling device] cameras specially made for astronomy. With the CCD cameras and special filters, we can read stars that are more than a million times fainter than what you can see with the eye. We found that we can do an amazing amount of research and train students with this telescope to do the same kind of work that they will do in graduate study or at major observatories.”

Williams’s funding wasn’t the only impromptu contribution to the new observatory. “We’ve had a couple of really good undergraduates who have helped the facility quite a bit,” Dufour says. “They not only trained other students—and even sometimes professors—to use the telescope, but they also did a number of modifications. One of our astrophysics students, Jayce Dowell [’05], came up with a better control for the dome motor. To move the dome, you used to have to climb down from the viewing platform, go over to the wall, and press a button. Thanks to Jayce, you can now do it from the viewing platform.”

The telescope observing time is split between training students in the use of the telescope and its instrumentation and student research projects. “For the size of our telescope, what we can do here is quite extraordinary,” Dufour says. “We might not be able to improve on Hubble’s Constant, but we can show students how to take spectra of galaxies and derive Hubble’s Constant. There’s not a lot we can’t do, although we haven’t embarked on any major research projects, yet, simply because there’s a lot of demand for use of the telescope.”

The telescope is used by students in about 10 courses, but roughly half its time is divided between two astronomy labs: one for students outside physics and astronomy and one for physics and astronomy majors who need training in heavy-weight observation and research. “Between those,” Dufour says, “we have our big introductory astronomy classes, with 50 students each semester, and they come to the observatory just to look through the telescope and learn the basics of visual observing through telescopes.”

Christopher Johns-Krull, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, uses the observatory on a regular basis. “The primary class we use it for is Astronomy 230, which is our lab for astronomy and astrophysics majors,” he says. “It’s used to do some general viewing, but it’s also important for class research projects. We have a couple of CCDs and a spectrometer that we attach to it so the students can do imaging and spectroscopy—basically taking science-quality data. A lot of the students look at the planets in our solar system and try to figure out their atmospheric composition. Some students look at stars or galaxies to determine composition or velocities, and some have tried to measure the red-shift of different galaxies, and that sort of thing. Or they might look at nebulae of different types—star-forming nebulae and planetary nebulae, for example—to see if there are differences in the ionization states or composition of the gases.”

That kind of training is critical, Johns-Krull says. “It’s extremely important for the 230 lab, where the goal of the class is to teach students how to take and analyze real science-quality data. You can download data from the Web or something like that, or make it up, but students don’t learn nearly as much if they don’t have the opportunity to go to a telescope and worry about what’s necessary to take data.”

And the inspiration factor is important, too. It’s exciting to students to have such a high-quality facility in their own backyard. “They enjoy it a lot,” Johns-Krull says. “They’re generally very impressed with it. Most of the students who come into Astronomy 230 either have never used a telescope or have never used a telescope larger than 8" in diameter. This one is 16", and it has real instrumentation, which many of them have never seen before.”

Students aren’t the only ones excited about the telescope. The observatory hosts an open house about once a month, during the first quarter-moon, which anyone can attend to get a peek at the cosmos. “We usually have 30 to 50 people if we’re not publicizing a special event,” Dufour says. “But we’ve had a couple special events where a whole lot more showed up.” One of those events was a major opposition of Mars in August 2003, when the red planet was very close to Earth and easy to observe. “Fortunately, we had everything in gear even though the observatory was new and it was the first week of classes,” Dufour says. “We were literally swamped with 600-plus people each night for five nights. The event was carried on several TV stations, and we were just run over by the popularity of the place.”

Johns-Krull recalls the reaction of the people who had the opportunity to get a close-up view of Mars. “Most of them had never looked through a telescope before,” he says. “The big telescope was able to show polar caps. Also, one-half of Mars is raised and mountainous, and the other half is more smooth, and they were able to see those sorts of details and were very excited by that.”

The observatory was even more popular in October 2004, when it provided views of a Lunar eclipse. “For the first time in the history of Rice, I think,” Dufour chuckles, “all seven TV stations were here, broadcasting the eclipse live.”

But the monthly viewings are just as enticing as the special events. “Saturn is always a crowd favorite because of the rings,” Johns-Krull says. “And the Moon is a favorite, too. While most people have seen the Moon many times, it’s just a white ball to them. Through the telescope, they actually can see mountains and valleys and stuff like that. It makes it really look like another world as opposed to just a white ball in the sky.”

The Rice Campus Observatory hosts regular open houses for public viewing and also is available for visits by alumni groups or class reunions. Check www.rice.edu/observatory for schedules and contact information.