WIYN celebrates five years

Astronomers, alumni and students from UW–Madison and other institutions marked the five-year anniversary of the WIYN Observatory on Kitt Peak in southern Arizona.

The centerpiece of the WIYN Observatory is a strikingly modern telescope with a 3.5-meter diameter mirror and sophisticated forefront instruments, including a spectrograph that can deploy optical fibers to analyze the light from 100 celestial objects simultaneously.

“In a very short time, the WIYN Observatory has become recognized internationally for its superb image quality, its unique instrumental capabilities and its operational efficiency,” says astronomy professor Robert Mathieu, president of the WIYN Board of Directors. “As a result, access to the observatory is heavily oversubscribed.”

A celebration Oct. 26-27 in New Haven, Conn., included a scientific symposium featuring the wide range of research conducted with WIYN.

The WIYN consortium recently expanded its reach with the acquisition of the historic 0.9-meter telescope next door on Kitt Peak. In addition to providing a wide-field window on the sky for WIYN research programs, the 0.9-meter telescope will increase research access to the skies for undergraduates and graduate students from the partner institutions.

The 0.9-meter is also used for a major educational outreach activity called Teacher Leaders in Research Based Science Education. TLRBSE trains high school teachers to mentor three other fellow teachers in the use of real astronomical data by students in the classroom, including the search for novae.