Yesterday, five Haverford astronomers arrived at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, with a few observing objectives. We flew into Tuscon during Tuesday, and drove to Kitt Peak yesterday after grabbing groceries for the week.
Here we (Matteo Miazzo, Chris Garling, Lee Rosenthal, and Alison Marqusee, minus Jonathan, who took the photo) are at the entrance to KPNO. The mountains in Arizona are awe inspiring, as are the telescopes.
The Mayall 4 – meter telescope dominates this picture, but we have views like this one most everywhere on the mountain. This week, we are observing on the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope. Haverford belongs to the WIYN consortium, a group of schools that share time on a 3.5 – meter and a 0.9 – meter telescope. We are hoping to observe the Persei twin globular clusters and maybe a few other Galactic objects of interest. We set up the 0.9 – meter last night, and although we had to close up early due to technical difficulties we learned plenty about how to operate the telescope.
Alison was the first to fill the liquid nitrogen dewer for the S2KB camera last night, and we look forward to taking data tonight!
We explored the 4 – meter telescope this morning, and got to see the 500 – ton dome rotate about this behemoth of a machine.
We will be here until Sunday morning, and will keep the blog updated with our astronomical adventures!
NSF AST-1151462, the Boughn-Gollub-Partridge Fund, the KINSC, and the Green Fund provide support for our student trips to observatories.