The Calvin College observatory is in the process of a major upgrade in addition to the improvements it received this summer.

This Christmas the Astronomy Department hopes to purchase two identical automated telescopes, costing a total of $240,000. These telescopes will allow the department to set up a remote robotic observatory at Rehoboth Christian High School in Rehoboth, New Mexico.

“Rehoboth has beautiful, dark skies — clear most of the time. If we put an identical automated telescope to what we will have at here at Calvin in Rehoboth, then we would still be able to take data on nights, whole weeks when it’s cloudy in Grand Rapids,” said Larry Molnar, professor of Physics and Astronomy and observatory director.

To fund the project the Astronomy Department applied to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for about $120,000. If the NSF accepts the application, Calvin will provide the remaining $120,000. If the NSF will not provide the money, the department plans to go to private donors for financial support, says Molnar.

The new telescopes will be the same diameter as the existing telescope, but will be fully automated. Observers will select a celestial object on a custom designed computer program; the telescope will then automatically locate that object in the night sky.

This new technology will make it much easier to locate celestial objects. “Currently it takes so long to find a deep sky object that most of the night is just spent searching and not in active observation,” says Peter Weise, an Astronomy 201 student.

Both telescopes will be controlled in an automated way right from Calvin’s campus by student observers. The telescope in New Mexico will provide clear skies for viewing and also allow students to program the telescope to run all night, gathering much more data than is ever possible with the current telescope, says Molnar.

The separate telescope in Rehoboth frees up the automated telescope on campus so that the several hundred visitors that Calvin receives each year can also use the new technology.

“[The telescope in Rehoboth] should be so productive that not only will our introductory students and our advanced students be able to get all the data they would want, but we should have time left over to give away. Our plan is to give it away to high schools to which Calvin has a relationship, starting with Rehoboth Christian High School,” says Molnar.

Pending the monies from the NSF, the first automated telescope will be installed in Calvin’s observatory in the summer of 2001; the second telescope will be installed in Rehoboth the following summer.

But that’s not all. This summer the Astronomy Department received $26,000 from the Calvin College Special Grants and Projects Fund, a small internal college fund of $100,000 that allows any department to submit a proposal for financial assistance to help purchase new equipment.

“Twenty-six thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money when you figure all the introductory astronomy students, plus the upper level students and the public can all appreciate some piece of it,” says Molnar.

With the money the department has purchaseda Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera, a Versaport slider and a computer compatible with the CCD camera, among other things.

The CCD camera will be hooked up the current telescope. Because of the potential sensitivity of the camera - “roughly 10,000 times more sensitive than your eye,” says Professor Molnar - the camera will allow observers to take pictures of objects, download the image to a computer and allow observers to see details and objects not visible with the human eye.

A mirror, called a Versaport Slider, will be set up along with the camera. “The idea is that you slide this mirror in and you can look through the telescope just as you always have. Slide the mirror out and the light comes into the camera instead; you can then take a picture of what you just saw that moment,” says Molnar.

The department also purchased a new planetarium program that allows the user to customize the program to show the night sky from the perspective of the Calvin observatory, making it much easier to locate celestial objects, says Molnar.

Additional purchases such as a filter wheel, an adaptive optics device and a spectrometer will provide additional advantages and improvements to viewing. Most of the new equipment should be operational sometime yet this fall, says Molnar.

“It’s all definitely worth the money,” says observatory assistant Aaron Everman. “It’s an all around improvement that allows the observatory to be much more useful and functional not only to students, but to the public at large.”

The department has already received much of this equipment and is installing it.

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