This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)
A generous donor is providing Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina with a new 17-inch telescope to be used jointly by the donor and ASU. The telescope will be housed in an existing dome at the university's "Dark Sky Observatory" (DSO) located at an elevation of over 3,000 feet about 20 miles from Boone. This telescope will join three others already operating at DSO and the costs for its installation will be aided by an award from NSF's Major Research Instrumentation program from the Division of Astronomical Sciences. Dr. Daniel Caton, a professor of astronomy at ASU and director of the DSO, is the principal investigator for the award. The funding will also be used to fully automate this and other DSO telescopes so that they can be operated remotely over the internet, either from the ASU campus or from other locations. The telescopes will be used to train students in observational astronomy and to carry out on-going research program in variable stars, Quasar and Active Galactic Nuclei variability, Gamma Ray Burst follow-up observations, and studies of binary asteroids.
Project Outcomes The main project telescope is a 17-inch, research quality telescope that was installed at Appalachian State University’s Dark Sky Observatory (DSO), donated by an advanced amateur who also uses it part of the time from his home in South Carolina. It was installed in a 2.5-meter diameter dome that previously housed an old, government excess-property telescope that had not proven useful. The new telescope was already equipped with a scientific quality digital (CCD) camera. Additional hardware and software components were integrated to provide a facility that runs under the Skynet software system developed (also with NSF support), for the PROMPT project at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Skynet system allows members, including faculty and students at North Carolina and other institutions, to schedule astronomical observations (images) to be obtained using the telescopes on the system. Observations are requested via a web page by specifying the celestial object and the number and type of images to be taken. After the observations are made the images may be downloaded by the observer over the Internet. We also did further upgrades to the other three DSO telescopes and the campus telescope to enhance their use under Skynet and/or remote control. The 32-inch telescope received an upgrade to the camera to allow better cooling, which lowers the "noise" or pixelization seen in long exposures made with digital cameras. The cooled camera is the blue box at the focus of the yellow-framed 32-inch telescope in the photo. Also, we added components for automatic dome-closing based on weather changes. The 18-inch telescope was similarly equipped for automatic dome-closing on weather changes and had a web-cam-finder with a wide angle field of view added to aid in finding the object of interest in the sky (seen as white telescope on mounting plate in the picture of the basically black 18-inch telescope). A third telescope, a 14-inch scope previously configured to run on Skynet, was equipped with a better focuser and enhanced camera cooling (shown in picture, on red mount). The DSO’s nighttime Meteor camera, which provided only a 90 by 140 degree view of the night sky, was replaced by the new fish-eye lens equipped all-sky camera to allow monitoring of the sky cloudiness when observing remotely. The picture shows the view of the night sky and some of the domes around the edge. Finally, the Rankin Science Observatory campus facility’s 16-inch telescope received weather instrumentation as well. That telescope is shown in the picture pointed at the twilight sky, with students preparing to observe. These enhancements not only mean that the observers can observe remotely over the Internet, but often automatically, meaning they can get normal sleep. Just the savings in time and money not driving to the observatory every night are an enormous benefit to the faculty and students involved. Intellectual Merit The acquired equipment allows expansion of current research to advance our knowledge of planetary, stellar and extragalactic astronomy, building on a strong foundation of past observational research and publication. The project enhanced the quality and quantity of observations in two new areas (asteroid research and Gamma Ray Bursts) for two of the three investigators. The project also supported the work of a graduate student who has now become a Science Operation Specialist at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. The project has extended the technical capabilities and experience of the DSO Observatory Engineer, the third investigator on the project.. ? Broader Impacts The broader impacts of the activity include offering more opportunity for research and student training not only at Appalachian State but to others nationally, and even internationally, by offering more observing opportunities over the Internet. Since about half of our majors are women, expanded observing capability is providing additional access to this population that is still generally underrepresented in science. Also, developing remote-use capability of these telescopes means that those with physical handicaps that would make telescope use difficult (but possible) will find it easy to use. We have also brought all of this work to the attention of the public with discussions and demonstrations at monthly Public Nights at the Dark Sky Observatory, and group sessions at the Rankin Science Observatory.
