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| Early Days Gerard P. Kuiper Early Graduate Students Missions to the Moon |
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Ewen Whitaker, on the 61-inch telescope In the earlier days, when we first got the telescope going, in order to have the eyepieces together I’d got a “Saniflush” box, a junk box, made into a thing with holes so the eyepieces would sit in it. I believe it’s still up in the dome. Completely wrecked, I’m sure. You’d think, okay, we’ve got these highly expensive eyepieces, let’s make a nice box for them, a wooden box. Was it ever made? No. George Coyne, on the consolidation of the telescopes Up until that time all the telescopes had been naturally under the administration of the Astronomy Department. When Kuiper came he got NASA funding to build what was then a major telescope, which is still there near Bigelow Mountain. The 61-inch it’s called. That was built to be a high-quality imaging telescope for the Ranger program, to map the Moon to select the sites. Of course that came under the administration of LPL, and eventually the Department of Planetary Sciences. |
But that telescope proved to be excellent for other reasons, especially work in the infrared. So it began to become a problem as to why doesn’t the University have one entity that administers all the telescopes. Well, of course to people at LPL that sounded like a takeover of a telescope that had been built by them, with Kuiper getting the money and all. So there was a bit of a struggle there. I was Director of the Catalina Observatories at that time, in order to try and mend fences, and bring people together rather than struggle. Bill Hubbard and I had conversations, as I recall, and eventually it became clear that it was not going to be a takeover. It was going to be called the University of Arizona Observatories, and that’s what it is today. It’s administered by Steward Observatory, but it has a board, a committee, that assigns telescope time and all of that, that consists of people from the Department of Planetary Sciences/LPL, Steward Observatory, and Arizona State in Tempe. So it has representatives of all astronomy institutions that are active in the state. So it really is the University of Arizona Observatories. The telescopes are available to all astronomers in Arizona, in this state, who submit proposals that are reviewed on a peer-review basis. Over the years the thing worked out very well. |
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