Students And Researchers Eye The Heavens As Project Nears Completion

Fayetteville, Ark. - When Galileo Galilei first trained his telescope on the night skies in 1609, he could never have imagined that 400 years later his simple refracting lens spyglass would be able to do its work without him-when, with the touch of a button, a telescope would take minutely detailed pictures of objects millions of miles away while he slept.

This fall, that dream will become a reality for hundreds of high school and college students as a joint project shared by the University of Arkansas; the University of Arkansas, Little Rock; the Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences; and Western New Mexico University brings the NFO Webscope online.

The Webscope, one of only a handful of web-based telescopes in the world, is a high-powered robotic telescope that allows astronomers to enter data via the Internet about an object they want to view. The telescope then makes the observations at the specified times, records them and notifies the researcher by e-mail when the job is completed.

"It's astronomy at a distance," said Claud Lacy, a physics professor at the U of A and one of the project's coordinators. "You don't have to be there. You don't have to stay up all night. It does its work while you sleep. It's really an excellent piece of equipment."

The scope will be used for both teaching and research, and students from all four of the participating institutions, as well as the Silver City, N.M., high school system, will share use of the scope.

"This represents a tremendous opportunity for the students," said Lacy. "The NFO Webscope is one of only three Web-based telescopes in the country that will be used primarily for education."

The high-powered scope will allow student and faculty researchers to observe in detail phenomena such as comets, eclipsing binary stars, gamma ray bursts, active galactic nuclei and asteroids.

"The advanced technology of the Webscope will allow us to view very faint objects and produce extremely vivid, detailed images of them," Lacy said. "The data we obtain could have significant consequences in the field of astronomy."

The planned asteroid observation project, for instance, will support NASA's programs to inventory the population of near-Earth asteroids to determine if they endanger the planet.

The Webscope consists of a 24-inch telescope donated by the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, a mounting system that has been modified with the addition of nanostepping motors (which move in tiny increments, as many as 100,000 per revolution) to allow it to be controlled by computer, and a specialized camera capable of taking pictures measuring 2000 x 2000 pixels, a field of view large enough to cover the full moon with a single image.

Students from the participating universities have played a large role in design and construction of the Webscope project. They helped move the telescope from Arkansas to New Mexico and programmed the camera and the embedded computers that control the instrument package motors. Several students also have been involved in initiating research projects that will serve as prototypes of those that will be conducted when the scope is completed.

"This project has been and will continue to be a wonderful opportunity for the students," said Lacy. "Their involvement in the design and construction of the scope has proven to be a great tool for expanding their knowledge of physics, programming and engineering, and their preliminary research projects have already yielded some excellent data."

The scope is housed at the NF Observatory, a nonprofit scientific organization begun in the 1970s by Bill Neely, an adjunct professor at Western New Mexico University. The observatory is located near Silver City, N.M., at an elevation of over 6,000 feet above sea level in a climate that has more than 200 clear nights per year, making it an excellent site for conducting astronomical observations.

"The combination of an excellent site, superior equipment, and expert construction will make the Webscope a wonderful tool, not only for cutting-edge research, but for teaching the next generation of astronomers." Lacy said.

Galileo would have been proud.