Who Knew?

After a long hiatus, “Who Knew?” is back. Wisconsin Week will publish answers to questions of campus interest posed by faculty and staff. We can’t promise to answer all questions submitted, but we’ll try to pick those most likely to be of interest to the largest number of readers. Please send your queries to wisweek@news.wisc.edu.

Josh Orton
Q. Which university-owned building or property is the farthest from the central campus? What happens there?

A. From milking sheep to stargazing at distant galaxies, the far-flung fringes of university environs offer the same diversity in activities as the condensed version in Madison.

Within the state, the university operates many facilities away from campus that serve a variety of purposes. Most are used for research, such as the sheep facility up in Spooner. Over at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the official line says, “Work at Spooner has helped sheep producers make better use of their forage, improve management practices and increase the reproductive efficiency of their animals.” CALS associate director Phil Dunigan says that sheep are also milked, and that some of the milk is sold to the specialty cheese market.

The farthest building patrolled by campus police officers is the Pine Bluff Observatory, a 30-minute drive west on Highway 14. Grad student Jennifer Hoffman, who lives at the observatory, says students lodge there overnight while doing research and paid work.

A bit farther afield – actually, about halfway around the world, a $3 million UW–Madison-built spectrograph will be installed and used in a huge southern African telescope. Aptly abbreviated to SALT, or Southern African Large Telescope, the instrument will be operated by an international consortium and, of course, UW–Madison has a grubstake in the project.

Astronomy professor Ken Nordsieck, who is overseeing local campus assembly of what will be the southern hemisphere’s largest spectrograph, says that because of its tremendous size and its southern location, SALT will be able to observe things that existing northern telescopes can’t, such as most of the stars in the Milky Way’s two nearest “satellite” galaxies.

Nordsieck says the SALT scope will observe “first scientific light” by the end of 2004. But no one from UW–Madison will need to live at the telescope: Students and faculty will be able to submit specific research requests using the Internet.