Observing Facilities
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The U.W. Astronomy department at the University of Washington is a major
user of many types of observational facilities on the ground and in space,
many of which are operated by agencies of the NSF and NASA. Those with
which we have guaranteed access and/or direct developmental and funding
responsibilities are:
- Apache Point
Observatory
- The APO 3.5-meter (138-inch) telescope is located in the Sacramento Mountains
of central New Mexico. Our department is one of several that
collaborated on the design and construction of this telescope. It is the
centerpiece of our ground-based "toolkit" for research, and is used by
faculty, graduate students, and postdocs about 100 nights
per year. The telescope is normally used from the U.W. campus over the
internet.
(Qualified UW users only:
3.5-m Time Request Form)
- Sloan Digital Sky Survey
- SDSS is a project the UW Astronomy department participates in along
with over twenty international partners. The project's primary aim is to
utilize the 2.5-meter (100-inch) special purpose telescope for a 5-color
photometric survey of
10,000 square degrees of sky to map the three-dimensional structure of
the distant universe, to understand the structure of the Milky Way, to
discover supernovae (exploding stars) whose intensity allows us to map
the expansion of the Universe, and to probe the depths of the solar
system and its primordial remnants still orbiting the Sun. The imaging
data are routinely calibrated and placed on the public web site
www.sdss.org. The imaging survey is complemented by an extensive
spectroscopic survey which will yield 1 million digital spectra.
The SDSS began its first mission -- a full sky survey -- in 2000.
It completed its first phase of operations -- SDSS-I -- in June,
2005. Over the course of five years, SDSS-I imaged more than 8,000
square degrees of the sky in five bandpasses, detecting nearly 200
million celestial objects, and it measured spectra of more than
675,000 galaxies, 90,000 quasars, and 185,000 stars. These data have
supported studies ranging from asteroids and nearby stars to the large
scale structure of the Universe.
The SDSS has entered a new phase, SDSS-II, continuing through June,
2008. With a consortium that now includes 25 institutions around the
globe, SDSS-II will carry out three distinct surveys: the Sloan
Legacy Survey, SEGUE, and the Sloan Supernova
Survey, to address new and fundamental questions about the nature of the Universe, the origin of
galaxies and quasars, and the formation and evolution of our own
Galaxy, the Milky Way.
(Details for UW users:
SDSS Research Links)
- Large Synoptic Survey
Telescope
- LSST will be an 8.4m telescope (330-inch) with a very wide field of
view
and a huge CCD camera mosaic that will map the sky twice weekly to the
sky limit in some bands. The telescope will produce many terabytes of
data per night. Images can be stacked for depth or compared to monitor
changes
in brightness or position. The project is presently in design. If fully
funded it can be operational byu about 2013. UW is a founding partner and
is active in the design of one of the major data pipelines.
-
Manastash Ridge Observatory
- The MRO 0.8-meter (30-inch) telescope is located in central Washington
state, 100 miles East of Seattle. It is used primarily for
undergraduate research projects and classes at UW.
(Qualified UW users only:
MRO Time Request Form)
- Physics
Shop
- The Department has ready access to the Physics Shop located on
the lab floor of our building. This shop has an extremely valuable
resource for new and very sophisticated hardware made with the most
modern of high-tech shop machinery. For example, the Physics Shop
has made all of the plug plates for the Sloan spectroscopic survey,
helped with our CCD cameras, and built hardware for each of our
observatories. Although the Astronomy Department does not operate
the shop, the shop has been a major resource to our faculty and
students.
In addition to these facilities, department members make extensive use of
NASA's "Great Observatories": the
Hubble Space Telescope,
the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, and the
Spitzer Infrared Telescope. We also use data from
other NASA satellites and the outstanding NSF-supported ground-based
national observatories'
optical,
infrared, and
radio telescopes.
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