High in the foothills between the Dish and the golf course, there’s a white structure that looks like the giant, disembodied head of a Star Wars stormtrooper.
Welcome to the Stanford Teaching Observatory, where faculty and students research distant objects of the cosmos. On this clear summer night, working by the light of three red bulbs, one lab team is trying to photograph a galaxy. A graduate student in aeronautics and astrophysics types a string of computer commands, and the monster Cassegrain/Newtonian telescope rotates into the designated viewing position while a shutter opens overhead.
“You’re nailing it,” teaching assistant Tim Braje tells a high school student tapping on another keyboard, as galaxy M100 comes into sharper focus. “Now press ‘calibrate.’ And let’s expose again.”
Members of the lab team whistle “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and trade ghost stories while they wait an interminable 10 minutes for colored filters to capture individual features of the spiral galaxy—the yellow aging nucleus and the younger, swirling blue arms with their red knots of stars in the process of being formed. When the image is finally unveiled, the students are starstruck. “Oooh,” says Teresa Miller, a usually pragmatic aero/astro master’s student who has her sights set on a career at Boeing or Lockheed. “It’s so beautiful.”
Pretty pictures are only part of the fun, says physics associate professor Roger Romani, a specialist in pulsars and black holes. Students also learn to measure redshifts in quasars and gauge the distances to planets, supernovas and exploding stars.
It helps to have an up-to-date observatory, and that’s been Romani’s priority over the past two years as he supervised the renovation of the telescope and the installation of a new dome. (The observatory was built in the 1970s by undergrads who secured physics department support and acquired the original dome—a Cal cast-off.)
Now, Romani says, students can connect their observations in the Foothills to discoveries made with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope. “Three years ago, we didn’t know whether the universe would end in a big crunch or would live forever,” he adds. “Today we believe that it not only will live forever, but will accelerate its expansion and go into a cold, dark, dim phase in the distant future.” Just how distant? Well, that’s part of what they’re trying to figure out.
