Senior Program Coordinator Robert T. Wilson views Saturn through a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory on April 7.

James Gregg / arizona daily star

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Kitt Peak National Observatory is turning 50. And while it no longer boasts the world's second-largest telescope and has been passed over as the site for a new generation of ever-larger telescopes, it still bristles with more than two dozen telescopes and plays an important role in the exploration of the universe.

The world's newest telescopes, those getting the public's attention and money — some with multiple 26-foot-diameter mirrors and costing hundreds of millions of dollars — are being located elsewhere. Higher mountaintops, mainly in Chile and Hawaii, offer better viewing, with less light pollution and distorting atmosphere between them and space.

But there's more going on than meets the eye at Kitt Peak and at its parent organization, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, headquartered on the University of Arizona campus. Kitt Peak, and the NOAO, hold a long-term lease with the Tohono O'odham Nation for the Kitt Peak site.

Kitt Peak's newest major night sky telescope, the WIYN Observatory 3.5-meter telescope (the 3.5 meters refers to the diameter of the telescope's primary mirror), was dedicated in 1994.

The 4-meter Mayall, the largest of the Kitt Peak telescopes, was the second-largest in the world when it was dedicated in 1973. Since then, telescopes with one or more 8-meter primary mirrors have been designed, built and put into service. And even larger telescopes are planned.

But mirror size isn't everything, and the national observatory's leaders are using the latest technologies to keep the small to medium Kitt Peak scopes capable of leading-edge astronomy.

Telescopes are analogous to cameras, says Kitt Peak National Observatory's director, Buell Jannuzi. A telescope's mirrors are like a camera's lens. And the instruments attached to the viewing end of that lens to analyze the light coming through the telescope are the film. Like photographic film, which comes in a variety of light and color sensitivities, each instrument that can be attached to the viewing end of the telescope has its own characteristics for analyzing or processing the light that comes through the visual path.

And as with photography, digital-image processing and the explosion in cheap computing power have changed telescope instrumentation. Drastic improvements in digital-imaging chip sensitivity to light and faster computers for processing the information have resulted in instruments that can glean more information from the light captured by a telescope — even relatively small ones.

So while Kitt Peak's telescopes are smaller and older than the world's largest telescopes, the instruments — cameras, spectrometers/spectrographs, etc. — attached to them are continually being upgraded or replaced. A recent directive from the National Science Foundation, which funds NOAO, called for upgrading instrumentation on telescopes at NOAO's Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

"It's possible to continue to get front-rank science out of the existing telescopes for decades by renewing the instrumentation and infrastructure to keep them current with modern technology," said David Sprayberry, an astronomer now working as the head of instrumentation for NOAO.

He said Newfirm, a brand-new infrared instrument for the Mayall telescope, is a good example.

"The technology for making infrared pixels has gotten dramatically better over the last 10 to 15 years. We've gone from instruments with one pixel to having millions and millions of pixels," Sprayberry said.

As proof of instrument technology being a great equalizer in the competition with larger telescopes, Sprayberry pointed out that "U.S. astronomers that have access to that through Kitt Peak have a forefront capability that can't be matched through larger telescopes. There are only two other telescopes in the whole world that have comparable fields of view."

Sometimes the advantage that an instrument offers is speed rather than power. An example is the work done by Liese van Zee, an astronomer from Indiana University specializing in the study of star formation and the evolution of dwarf galaxies.

"I'm trying to understand how stars form in the smallest galaxies in the universe — galaxies that haven't been eaten yet by the Milky Way," van Zee said.

She uses a spectrographic instrument called Hydra on Kitt Peak's WIYN 3.5-meter telescope. Hydra can view and analyze the light coming from dozens of objects at once, dramatically increasing the amount of work she can do with the precious viewing time allotted to her. It uses fiber-optic cables to look at different objects within the telescope's field of view.

"My work is like looking for a needle in a haystack," van Zee said. "I need to look at as many objects as I can."

Her work also proves the continued value of even smaller telescopes. Van Zee uses the WIYN's smaller 0.9-meter companion telescope to detect objects she wants to investigate, before switching to the 3.5-meter WIYN and Hydra to analyze them.

While instruments are telescope attachments, they're hardly a cheap afterthought. In some cases, they cost nearly as much, and take nearly as long to plan and build, as some telescopes.

In the case of the multimillion-dollar One Degree Imager, known as the ODI, a new instrument for the WIYN, it's been in the works for several years and probably won't come on line until late 2010. Sprayberry said it will likely cost as much as a world-class telescope would have in the days when the Mayall was built.

The design, construction and maintenance of instruments and work on new telescopes mean the location of newer, larger telescopes elsewhere in the world won't necessarily diminish Kitt Peak's and NOAO's Tucson operations, Jannuzi said.

Approximately 200 people work in the NOAO headquarters building on the UA campus, Sprayberry said. Many are engineers, scientists and technicians involved in the design and construction of instruments for Kitt Peak scopes and other observatories where NOAO has telescopes or partnerships in group projects. The staff is also involved in the design of one of the giant-class telescopes, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be located in Chile.