Although wind and rain pounded the walls of the College of Arts and Sciences building last Sunday night, the Boston University Astronomical Society met as scheduled, not allowing Mother Nature to interfere with its weekly gathering.
Convening over Fig Newtons, mangos and cream soda, the group’s members seem more like a bunch of friends than an organized group. They come from places as far as Idaho and they major in everything from international relations to physics, but their interest in the night sky is what brings them together every Sunday night — rain or moonshine.
This stormy Sunday night, the Astronomical Society discussed future plans of a potluck picnic on the rooftop of CAS and a trip to the Arunah Hill Natural Science Center in western Massachusetts before leaving their tidy meeting room to get down to the real business of the evening — building a homemade telescope in a more rugged workroom down the hall.
“It’s a labor of love,” CAS sophomore Evin Erdowdu said.
The telescope, which is the exclusive property of the Astronomical Society, is a thick red cylinder measuring three-and-a-half feet tall and is spray-painted by members who want to create their own designs. With a pre-ordered, ten-inch diameter mirror, it is also one of the largest telescopes in BU’s Judson B. Coit Observatory.
Once the group gets its homemade telescope up and running, members will be able to use it to see cosmic bodies as distant as the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy, despite the clouds and artificial lights that crowd Boston’s sky. The observatory’s close proximity to the urban area, low altitude and humid surroundings are obstacles the group must overcome to get a clear shot of the night sky.
Stargazing success strongly correlates to weather patterns, and the society’s members gather at the observatory whenever Mother Nature graces Boston with a clear night — which isn’t too often. In fact, they crossed their fingers for clear skies for the Arunah Hill trip.
“We’ll try to move the weather to be clear on Friday,” Astronomical Society President Michael Gully-Santiago, a CAS senior, joked.
Despite the coastal and urban setting, BU Astronomical Society Vice President Chad Madsen, a CAS sophomore, said he has observed interesting cosmic bodies, including different types of stars in the universe, and has measured the rings of Saturn in lab for an astronomy course.
Observatory curator Quinn Sykes described an ideal telescope location in a Feb. 20 Daily Free Press article.
“You want a dark sky, so you don’t want to be near any cities,” he said. “You want a dry sky, water particles will scatter the light. You want to be above the atmosphere at a high elevation. It’s nice if it doesn’t have a lot of weather [that blows clouds over the telescope].”
Boston’s less than ideal location for observing has sent astronomy professors to conduct research at remote observatories in Flagstaff, Arizona, Chile, Hawaii and even Antarctica.
“We have various kinds of timeshares [for telescopes],” said astronomy professor Kenneth Janes in the Free Press article. “I’ve used telescopes all over the world, at one time or another.”
While professors and researchers travel around the globe to study the universe, BU’s observatory is used mainly for stargazing and teaching purposes. Most astronomy classes convene there a few times during the semester to give students a chance to apply and observe what they have learned in lecture. In higher level courses, students also come to the observatory to learn how to handle the intricate astronomy equipment.
In addition to the Astronomical Society’s Sunday night meetings, the observatory also holds an open night every Wednesday — weather-permitting, of course — so BU students and faculty have the chance to take a guided look at the cosmos. The open-night crowds vary in size — from as few as one onlooker to around 600 a few years ago for a special Mars event, Gully-Santiago said.
Madsen said any BU student can get a “moon key” — one that grants access to any room in the observatory — after being trained by one of the society’s members to handle the “scopes,” most of which cost thousands of dollars.
“Anybody who’s really interested can come up here and ask one of us to train,” Madsen said. “So they can essentially come up anytime they want to observe . . . we just have to approve that they know how to safely use the telescopes.”
The observatory itself is dark, except for the sparse bulbs that emit red light, most of which were not working on Sunday. Madsen provided the tour of observatory via the light from his cellular phone.
“We use red light because it’s actually lower wavelength, and you don’t react to it as much,” Madsen said. “Your eyes are used to white light.”
On the roof of CAS, the rain and wind whipped everywhere and obstructed the view of the Boston skyline as well as the night sky. Madsen first points to three posts where expensive eight-inch reflector telescopes are mounted. Two of these reflectors are equipped with star-tracking global positioning systems to facilitate the location of cosmic bodies.
Madsen makes his way over to a dome of intertwining arches under which stargazers can place a telescope to navigate the skies. The arches provide a way for marking coordinates on the night sky’s longitude and latitude without using GPS.
Back inside, but barely sheltered from the storm, beneath a small aluminum dome with a pumpkin painted in its outside, Madsen points out a long, mounted refracting scope with a six-inch lens. Although it may appear to be the observatory’s most prestigious piece of equipment, its length is the result of the lens’ need for more space to produce a picture. The reflectors are much more practical pieces of equipment. They are shorter, wider and use mirrors instead of lenses to produce an image.
“In modern day, right now, reflectors are most often used because they’re just more practical,” Madsen said. “[They] have their problems but they’re much more easily fixed than refractors.”
One telescope at the observatory is a reflector with a 10-inch mirror diameter. Mostly used for teaching purposes, it is attached to a computer with a charge-coupled device camera that captures the images generated by electrons of light as digital pixels. The telescope’s computer is also connected to a television that broadcasts the pictures to students.
Returning outside to the extreme New England weather, Madsen points out a radio telescope. Surrounded by a large satellite dish, it looks more like it is meant for television reception than stargazing. Madsen explains that this telescope can pick-up long wavelength radio waves that are emitted everywhere in the universe. The telescope, which is used in high-level observation courses, can pick up “long-range” images of galaxies and the sun.
“Radio waves are actually light, except they’re really long wavelengths that our eyes can’t detect,” Madsen said. “The thing is that since they have such big wavelengths, we have to have a bigger dish in order to see [them].”
While BU stargazing regulars enjoy the views the equipment offers, Sykes said he plans to one day revamp the observatory.
“I’ve been working on buying some new equipment and upgrading some of our scopes that are older,” Sykes said in the Free Press article. “I’d like to refurbish our domes, but it costs a lot of money . . . I’m looking forward to what I can afford to do.”