The Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT), a 4.3 meter optical telescope managed by Lowell Observatory, is depicted on a clear winter day near Happy Jack, in Arizona. Credit: SSR2000/Wikimedia Commons (CC By-Sa 3.0)
When he becomes a young observer of the skies, happy to be outside a dark field at night with a scope of 6 or 8 inches, he never dreams of the type of night of observation that I lived on Thursday 5 June. I am in Flagstaff, in Arizona, during a part of this week, spending some time during the annual meeting of Lowell Observatory, a member of his consultative committee. Thursday, a lucky group of a dozen of us traveled for an hour to the south and a little east of the city towards the largest telescope of the institution, the 4.3 m Discovery Lowell telescope. We spent an evening watching objects from the deep sky in what was the dream of a deep observer.
The distinct astronomer Gerard Van Belle guided us in a Lowell van and we arrived at the top of this large telescope in the first evening. A bright moon was out and the sky cleared well enough after a couple of days mostly cloudy in the area. Our guide for the evening was another Lowell astronomer, Stephen Levine, who managed the telescope and chose objectives that we would have observed. For an enthusiastic observer of the sky, it was like being hit by lightning and going to heaven.
Our guides could not have been better. Stephen is the scientist leader of the Discovery Lowell telescope and his research interests are many, including astrometric surveys and the numerical simulation of the dynamics of the Astrophysical disc systems. It also leads star -concealing studies on the objects of the external sun system. Gerard is director of the observatory science and its research areas include unique skills in an array of optical telescopes for carrying out high space resolution observations.
Once we were placed and discussed issues in the observatory control room, our group made its way into the dome and prepared for the observation. I have observed a few times with some very large telescopes, at the Mount Wilson Observatory, the Yerkes Observatory and the McDonald Observatory, but this was at the top of the list for opening and a modern structure and avant -garde.
It is absolutely surprising to see a 4.3 m mammoth of telescope that looms on you, equipped with a visual back and a 2 -inch 30 mm scientific eyepiece. Simply incredible. It was like being transported to a wonderful episode of The Twilight area. The visual field of this huge telescope, with relatively low power, was only about 3 arms, so obviously we were watching small objects.
The first was the M3 globular cluster in Canes veatics and, of course, we have essentially seen only the nucleus of the cluster, well resolved to the face of individual and yellowish stars. At its distance of 34,000 light years, the cluster was incredibly bright in such a large telescope. Subsequently, we turned to a game of hypothesis. Stephen asked me, like a deep dice, to guess which galaxy we were watching. Of course, being inside the dome, it was not really seen where the telescope was turned, although it was close to the Zenit. Well, I didn’t know, and it turned out to be a close vision of the Whirlpool galaxy in a completely different way from what I had ever seen before. We only saw the bright central hub of M51 (the partner, NGC 5195, was well off the pitch), with some sparkling field stars and with the beginning of large, bright and spiral spiral arms that emanated from the hub, with seven dark areas of the field between the beginning of the arms. It was absolutely surprising.
We then moved on to a planetary nebula (small and with high brightness of the surface, they are perfectly made for such small views). It was the nebula of the cat’s eyes to Draco, NGC 6543, and it seemed incredible – simply completely different from what I had ever seen before. It had a strong blue color, a bit like a blue egg blue and a prominent disk surrounding the central star, with some hints of “spiral” structure in the whole disc, and easily showing the central light star, which lights up a little more passed out of 11th size.
The whole experience was haunted by great and fun discussions with astronomers and other guests, and we returned to Mars Hill late at night, much richer for the experience and very happy to have visually looked through such a great telescope. I hope this is an experience that every fan of astronomy has the opportunity to do in a few moments in their life.
