Monday, May 22nd
Not going to lie, this was probably one of my favorite days out of my month in Arizona (or in the top five at the very least). Why? Well, we got to take a field trip to another of the many observatories in southern Arizona, and man was this a cool one! What wasn’t so cool was the 2.5 hour drive to get there, but it was worth it.
Our destination was the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, home of the VERITAS gamma ray telescope and the 6-m Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), which has, you guessed it, a single mirror. Wait a second…well, it used to be made of multiple mirrors, but let this be a lesson to all of you considering getting into the telescope naming business. The MMT is somewhat of a testing telescope, in that it was the first to use an array of mirrors as the primary “mirror” and it was also the first to have a primary mirror larger than 4-m. Of course, to install the giant 6-m mirror they had to first remove the multiple mirrors, leaving us with the now inaccurate name.
The first part of our tour was a video about the construction of the MMT. You might be thinking, “Oh, well that’s cool, but haven’t you been learning about telescopes for the past two weeks?” Well, yes, but the MMT is no ordinary telescope. You see, it’s perched on a very pointy peak and the road up the mountain is very steep with no guard rails, culminating in a 24% grade incline to the telescope site. Not to mention that there isn’t actually room for anything larger than a van to turn around up there…it might not be surprising then that the observatory doesn’t actually allow members of the public to drive up there themselves. Instead, we got to ride up in a fancy school bus!
We wound our way up the steep, winding, dirt road, taking a couple of hours to reach our picnic spot after stopping briefly at an older observatory with lots of historical telescopes. After lunch, we were given the option to either walk the remaining half-mile to the summit or to ride in the SUVs they had ready for us. Remember that I said nothing larger than a van can turn around up there? Yes, that includes busses….I opted to walk. During the walk (and also during the whole bus ride up, to be honest) I was thinking about the process of getting that huge 6-m mirror up this crazy road – 1) the truck driver couldn’t see the road during that last stretch with a 24% incline so had to be directed and 2) they had to use a crane to pick up the truck and turn it around so it could drive back down the mountain! To this day, I still wonder who decided it would be a good idea to put that observatory where it is.
Here are some fun facts about the MMT:
The MMT has served as a testbed for new astronomical instrumentation and imaging techniques, helping move astronomy forward.
As mentioned before, it’s not actually made of multiple mirrors anymore! Instead, it has a single 6-m primary mirror. Consequently, “MMT” isn’t actually an acronym anymore.
They actually had to expand the building once the 6-m mirror was installed, because the telscope (primary + secondary mirrors, and all the necessary structural supports) didn’t fit anymore.
The MMT was the first telescope to have a deformable secondary mirror, which allows for real-time corrections to atmospheric distortions of light and greatly improves the quality of data collected.
The MMT was the first large telescope to use an altitude-azimuth mount (like the WIYN telescope) rather than an equatorial mount (like the Mayall telescope).
Rather than the telescope rotating inside the building to switch observing targets, the entire building rotates with the telescope! Consequently, the building has snow plow shovels attached to it to clear snow pile-ups as it rotates.
They were having a problem with cold air leaking from the telescope and messing up observing conditions inside the building, so the solution was to run to Walgreens to buy shower caps to put over the leaking vents.
