AASTA Observatory
Brief History
The telescope was designed, constructed, and installed at the observatory in 1971 by scientists working at, what is now, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
One of the first uses of the telescope was to support the on-going studies of auroral phenomena in Earth’s upper atmosphere high above the Pacific Northwest. Over the next several years, the instrument was key in other research projects—many involving Saturn’s moon Titan, white dwarf stars, and searches for black holes. Around the mid-1980s, much of the research activity had ceased, and for the next 10 or so years, the telescope, and the rest of the observatory, had been relegated to "mothballed" status.
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The telescope and its housing were owned by Battelle Memorial Institute (which also operates PNNL for the U.S. Department of Energy). The mounting, the optics, the hardware for mechanically moving it to point at different objects in the sky, and the electronics for interacting with the hardware, were all custom-designed for this specific instrument. In essence, no other telescope precisely like it exists in the world. Moreover, this telescope was a pioneer in the use of friction rollers to effect its motion as opposed to gears.
Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Battelle, AASTA had sole management and operational authority of the observatory. In August 2005, as its largest donation to date, Battelle transfered ownership of the observatory to AASTA.
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AASTA assumed management and operational authority of the observatory in 1996, with the goal of refurbishing and upgrading the telescope so that it may become a resource for enhancing opportunities science education. By this time, the telescope was showing significant deterioration. |
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Rust spots were appearing on the outside of the tube, and the control electronics (above), while still functional, no longer provided reliable positional information of the telescope. Still, it remained the largest, most powerful, optical research-grade telescope in Washington State. |
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The primary mirror (at right), at the base of the optical tube, had accumulated a layer of dust; its reflective coating was severely oxidized, and it had lost perhaps 30% of its original reflectivity. |
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Still, the telescope was operational, and the roller mechanisims were mechanically sound (albeit with evidence that some creative repairs had been made over the years). |
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Because of its location on the ALE Reserve, it was apparent that physically bringing the number of students to the telescope to make it anywhere near effective as an educational tool is essentially impossible. Rather, a much more feasible approach is to enable the use of the telescope remotely, via the Internet. In other words, if the students cannot be brought to the telescope, bring the telescope to the students. |
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At the time of the project’s inception, the World Wide Web was just beginning to see widespread use, and some promising software technologies, including Java applets, were coming into being. Remote access to the telescope was to be accomplished through the development of custom Java applets that would appear in the user’s web browser. These applets would present a view of the telescope in way such that its operation was as intuitive as possible. User interactions would be communicated back over the Internet to the telescope control computer (TCC), which would activate the telescope hardware to carry out the user’s command. Data, most likely in the form of images, would be transmitted back to the user’s computer for processing and analysis.