The Last Stargazers

The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers

Emily Levesque 2020 Beaverton Library 520.92 LEV

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Levesque

• https://www.emlevesque.com/

• https://astro.washington.edu/people/emily-levesque

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_supergiant

• LBVs = Luminous blue variable

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93%C5%BBytkow_object

Very enjoyable and interesting book, an astronomer's "coming of age" story, and the transition of astronomy from eyepieces to data-mining software.

• Introduction, using the Subaru telescope on Maunakea Hawai'i, 14000 ft elevation, 57% oxygen

  • loud noise, mechanical support failure, 4 foot 400 pound secondary mirror still attached
  • "I broke the telescope" stories, Green Bank WV 100 meter radio telescope, 1988 collapse, replaced 2001

• p001 May 2004 MIT sophomore, Arizona Kitt Peak, study red super-giants with Phil Massey

• p005 1986 parents teachers Taunton MA Celestron C8
• p007 Geoffrey T. William's Planetron books
• p008 7yo, Astronomy night, Wheaton College professor says "Take as much mathematics as you can"

• p016 2002 MIT matriculation, first physics course Really Hard, prof Frank Wilcek

  • two blackboard mathematical proof, "the simplicity of this is deceptive"

• p019 sophomore observational astronomy course by Jim Elliot died 2021/3/3 67yo

• p019 George R. Wallace Jr. Observatory Westford MA supporter Wallace MIT 1913, dedicated 1971

• p023 Jan 2004 visits Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, worked with Sally Oey

• p024 first paper, largest observed star 1500 R☉, 7 AU, Jupiter 5.2 AU

• p027 George Wallerstein, 86 yo emeritus at UW 2016

• p028 fewer than 100 top notch telescopes around the world
• p033 1 meter naked eye Eta Carinae
• p034-38 Kodak photographic plates
• p039 astronomer handling plates at prime focus, assistant moving the dome
• p039-49 plate telescope stories, p49 CCD imagers

• p050 Palomar 200 inch largest before 1975 Russian 6 meter 1975, surpassed by Keck in 1990

• p056 Travelling astronomers; dressed too warm, awake late; departing pale and half-asleep
• p057 newbie drivers on steep summit roads. High-centering over only curb on the mountain, fortuitous tow truck
• p064 nights (cold, moon) assigned by target: blue, no moon; IR, moon no problem. photometric? excellent. weather?
• p065 photometric? excellent. weather? reschedule, retravel, months later
• p066 wacky superstitions, clothing, food, tables in the cafeteria

• p070 computers point the telescopes, astronomers are absolutely terrible finding things by eyeball in the night sky

• p071 worse than wasting time is observing the wrong thing

• p071 best telescopes cost $15K to $55K per night to operate
• p072 raw data looks awful before processing
• p072 imaging (with filters) or spectroscopy

• p074 reducing the data, removing contamination such as varied pixel sensitivity

• p075 "leaf blower" reductions during observation to ensure all is going well
• p076 romance gets you to 3am, then energetic music to combat haze
• p077 classical music or no music? untrustworthy
• p078 first Las Campanas observations canceled by wind, but naked eye viewing awesome
• p082 earthquake

• p085 Apache Point Observatory mirrors sandblasted with gypsum sand

• p086 Canary Island telescopes and Saharan dust / lightning
• p088 2003 Canberra brushfires devastated Mount Stromlo Observatory
• p088 "There's about to be an earthquake" because tiny tremors make stars skitter
• p089 shaking stops, immediately return to dead center

• p089 vog volcanic sulfur dioxide makes mildly acidic fog

• p091 Best volcano story, Manatash ridge 90 mi east of Mount Saint Helens, UW Doug Geisler log entry:
  • Hours lost: 6 Reason: Volcano (good excuse, huh?) Sky Condition: Black + smelly.
  • ... I've heard of the dark run but this is ridiculous
• p092 Chilean wildlife, tarantulas common

• p093 miller moths scourge of American West observatories

• p093 mothinator: lamp, fan, and industrial sized garbage bucket that fills in days

• p094 scorpions, Sarah Tuttle painful sting, legend evolved to helicopter evacuation

• p095 Chilean viscacha love watching sunsets, astronomer favorites

• p098 1988 November 15 Green Bank 300 ft radio telescope collapse

  • But It Was Fun 2007 author Greg Monk

  • replaced with 100m telescope August 2000 website

• p102 optical mirror accuracy must be 20 nanometers, Hubble Space telescope too flat by 2.5 micrometers

• p110 "Ohio gunman" (actually newhire fail) shoots McDonald Observatory 107 inch telescope mirror (Cassegrain focus, big hole in center )

  • still functional, one percent less light
• p111 altitude: confusion and gibberish, Mauna Kea 14000 feet (60% of sea level oxygen), dorms at 9000 ft (70%)
• p112 hours from medical care, PBS interviewer Alan Alda suffered intestinal strangulation
• p115 interlocks depower dome motors, but 500 tonne Kitt Peak dome silently coasts for several feet before stopping. In 1987, that killed astronomer Marc Aaronson as he stepped through a door to the exterior catwalk
• p117-20, middle-aged male Caltech astronomer doesn't understand 5 foot 2 inch 25yo Dr. Emily is PI and observer at Keck that night

• p122 1955, Mount Wilson grants observing time to Geoff Burbidge, enabling Margaret Burbidge to actually observe. They stayed in a small promitive cottage because Margaret was banned from "the Monastery" male-only astronomer's dormitory.

  • B²FH paper "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars"

• p124 Vera Rubin anomalous rotation

• p127 women earned 40% of the 186 astronomy PhDs awarded in 2017

• p128 running joke at Las Campanas Observatory "a woman behind every tree" on the treeless summit

• p132 Observatory siting conflicts

• p133 Mount Graham, Mauna Kea protests

• p134-142 Thirty Meter Telescope

  • alternative: $1.5B Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) on Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile

  • what if $5/kg spacelaunch could put 30 meter telescope mirror segments in high orbit?

    • ELT: 39 meter primary mirror, 798 hexagonal segments, 1.4 meters across, 50 mm thick, 0.17m³
    • 2500 kg/m3 for borosilicate glass, so 430 kg for solid glass segments, less if waffled
    • Est 500 kg with supports, $2500 per segment, $2M to launch with launchloop
    • less with segment waffling, more with shroud and apogee motors ...

    • Overwhelmingly Large Telescope 100 meter €1.5e9? €2.1e10?

• p143 Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico

  • 27 + 1 spare 25-meter dishes in Y-shaped array, 73 MHz to 50 GHz, 13,250 m²
• p146 "... if less than a millijansky per beam ..." (mJy = 1e-29 W/m²-Hz )
• p148 combined interferometry spread across Earth to take first picture of black hole 53 Mly away

• p150 155 mph Hurricane Maria (2017) Arecibo observatory kept observing

  • note: decommissioned mid-2020 after receiver platform cable breaks, partial collapse December 1 2020

• p152 quote from Bartel 1987 VLBI Observations ..., page 507 of paper:

  • No data were taken at station D during the period 0830 to 1630 GST due to the presence of a red racer snake (Coluber constrictor) draped across the high-tension wires (33,000 V) serving the station. However, even though this snake, or rather a three-foot section of its remains, was caught in the act of causing an arc between the transmission lines, we do not consider it responsible for the loss of data. Rather, we blame the incompetence of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo borealis) who had apparently built a defective nets that fell off the top of a nearby transmission tower, casting her nestlings to the ground, along with their entire food reserve consisting of a pack rat, a kangaroo rat, and several snakes, with the exception of the above-mentioned snake who had a somewhat higher destiny. No comparable loss of data occurred at the other antenna sites.

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