Star Gazing

This past Friday evening, some friends and I headed up to UVa’s observatory at Fan Mountain. The Astronomy Department does most of its research here, having abandoned the Leander McCormick Observatory on O’Hill in favor of a more remote location (yes, the “O” in “O’Hill” does indeed stand for Observatory). Fan Mountain hosts public nights just twice a year: once in the Fall, and once in the Spring, in this case, Friday, April 28^th. In order to curtail the amount of people coming to the event, or maybe just to keep out the riffraff, all interested parties are required to send a self-addressed, stamped envelope before the event to request tickets. It’s a free event, but you must have tickets!! This proved not exactly true, but I appreciate the point. They also don’t encourage small children to come, but no one really paid attention to that suggestion, either. At about 6:30pm, Laura, Adam, Greg and I grabbed some pizza from Christian’s. I mean, let’s be honest: we’re already off to a great start! We head down 29 South towards Covesville for about 14 miles, scanning for the turn-off onto the gravel road that would take us to the top of the mountain. It’s about 3 miles up this road, and also a bit scary. I was worried my super-charged Daewoo wouldn’t make it, but she was tried and true. We arrived just at dusk, the sky slowly darkening, the stars coming out one by one. Dr. Murphy was there in his characteristic khakis and a tan coat that seems hardly fitting for the cold evening ahead. I learned from our earlier trip up to McCormick that being outside all night can get chilly, and is not, as one “Friend of the Leander McCormick Observatory” put it while she served us coffee and donuts (two cups and a donut = $3!), for the faint of heart. The swarm of people was divided up as best as possible, grad students leading separate groups around to the different telescopes while Dr. Murphy gave a slide show on the side of the old foreman’s house for the people waiting. I have to say, one of my favorite parts of the evening was when Dr. Murphy pointed out constellations with his green laser pointer, circling tiny parts of the sky as if on a projector screen only a few feet away. I definitely want one of those. Fan Mountain’s largest scope boasts a 40” (or 1.0 meter, if you’d like) astrometric reflector (i.e., mirror), capable of obtaining fairly crisp images from extremely distant objects when recorded with a digital camera over long exposures. An interesting thing about the procedure for recording images is that they keep the camera in a chamber cooled by liquid nitrogen in order to reduce “noise”. Why liquid N₂? Because it is cheap. The basic premise behind telescope accuracy is that the more light it can gather, the better the image. For this public night, the scope was pointed at Saturn. Now, Saturn is pretty bright, so it honestly looks kind of fake. Or rather, it looks like a planetary model in a sixth-grade science fair project. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still amazing. Upon stepping up to the tiny eyepiece mounted at the back of the enormous telescope, Laura let out what I thought was giddy laughter. She had mentioned earlier being really excited to see Saturn, but she was laughing because she thought Saturn looked like a glow-in-the-dark sticker you’d put on the wall. To put this in perspective, one Charlottesville Astronomical Society member commented that using something as powerful as the 40” scope to view Saturn was like “using a sledge hammer to kill a fly”. A handful of CAS members were there with maybe eight (or more?) of their own telescopes trained on different objects for anyone to look at. These “amateur astronomers” were looking at all kinds of awesome things, including the “Beehive” open star cluster close to Saturn (aka: “Praesepe”, which you can actually see incredibly well through binoculars), Jupiter (and its four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede & Calisto), several globular star clusters, a comet and two fuzzy spiral galaxies whose names I have forgotten. Before leaving, we went back up to the 40” scope which was now pointed at the Sombrero Galaxy. Oh, man, I was ecstatic. This galaxy is perhaps one of my favorites because it looks much different than my other ideas of how a spiral galaxy generally looks. Unfortunately, our eyes are not sensitive enough to capture the crisp images we have come to associate with the objects in our universe. So the Sombrero Galaxy we saw on Friday looked a bit more like this. Part of my fascination with space has been exacerbated by Simon Singh’s Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe. Though focused on the Big Bang and the chain of events that led astronomers, cosmologists, physicists, scientists and philosophers alike to develop this theory, this book is practically a quick history of astronomy itself. Looking through the telescopes Friday night and knowing what little I already do about the cosmos, I can only imagine how astounded those guys must have been as they discovered more and more about space. Seeing those images with my own eyes, essentially looking not just at something incredibly far away, but also back in time, absolutely floors me. That, and the excitement of the impossibility of knowing all that is out there besides Earth, and also because this emphasizes how completely insignificant we are. It’s absolutely beautiful.