9UNP0177SD_Jim_Lattis

- Welcome to UW Space Place. I'm Jim Lattis. I'm the director here. And I'm pleased to fill-in as a speaker today for the scheduled talk. I would like to talk about the history of astronomy at UW. And specifically about the beginnings and the history of Washburn Observatory, and then how that fits into the subsequent development of astronomy, all of which is represented here at Space Place. So afterwards, you're welcome to go into our exhibit hall right over here and take a look around. You'll see, actually, an awful lot of exhibits relating to the history of Washburn Observatory, both in our history exhibit and in our spacecraft exhibits over there. So, Washburn Observatory, as it says there in the title, goes back to the days when Wisconsin was pretty much at the western frontier of the United States. And really, the observatory itself, we date back to 1881, which is when it opened. 
It was inaugurated in the fall of 1881. Astronomy at UW goes back considerably further than that. The University of Wisconsin, as you know, was founded in 1849, many years before the observatory itself was founded. And astronomy, from the very beginning, was a required subject of the students at the university. Astronomy was a required course. And the original plans for the university foresaw an observatory. In fact, it was supposed to be on the roof of Bascom Hall. And original designs of Bascom Hall had a dome. In fact, the original construction had a dome. Of course, it doesn't survive the fire in the interim. 
But that wouldn't have been a good place for an observatory. So, I'm just as glad they never got around to putting the observatory on Bascom Hall. The point is that an observatories and astronomy had a place at the university, really, from the very beginning. But it didn't become a reality until the mid-1870s. With the plan, really, of Washburn, whose donation made it happen. I'll talk about Washburn here in just a moment. This is what Washburn Observatory basically looks like today. This is how it looked in its completed form in 1881, or shortly thereafter. And I'd just like to explain to you what we're looking at here a little bit. Probably, most of you have at least been up to Washburn Observatory or been by it once or twice. 
The observatory is on that nice hill, Observatory Hill, looking over the lake, which you can't see in this picture. Lake Mendota is right out there to the north of the hill that the observatory is on. This is the southern exposure of the hill here. The landscaping looks a lot different now. But the building is about the same. There's the main telescope dome there, which we'll talk a little bit more. The main building. And an eastern annex that was added on after the original conception. That first picture I showed you, it never actually looked like that, because it drew this eastern extension. And then in those days, there was a student observatory, which you see right over here. 
It no longer exists on that site. And just down the hill, is something called the Watson Solar Observatory, which I'll talk about a little bit, too. So these things are now gone. Both the student observatory and the Watson Solar Observatory no longer exist there. The student observatory, which was removed from that site in the 1950s, actually still exists. And you might see it, if you drive out Fish Hatchery Road. There's a restaurant, I forget what it's called now. It used to be called La Paella. And just as you're driving south and you see that building on your left, if you look over your left shoulder up onto the hill, you'll see this building, sort of out there in Fitchburg. And in the 1950s, I don't know the date, it was given to the Madison Astronomical Society, our local astronomical club. 
They used it as their club observatory for quite some years before they got a better site out in the country. Now it sits there only as a landmark. And this, of course, is what the observatory looks like today, looking from the north side, from the lake side, back there. The observatory dome is pretty much in its original shape, with a few minor exceptions. The main dome houses the main telescope here. And you can actually see evidence of the other telescope that used to be housed in that building. If you look carefully, you'll notice there's some oddly long shutters right there. You'll spot them on the south side of the building as well. And in the old days, there were sets of shutters that went up through the pitched roof on both sides. You could actually open up that building for a view of a strip of the sky that ran from north to south, just along where you can see the shutters would open. 
In the 19th century, observatories, it was very common to have two instruments, the equatorial refractor, which we still have, and then a transit telescope that made specific kinds of positional observations of stars and other bodies. It looked through this slit that was open to the sky. This was the transit room, right here. That observatory then took shape because of the donation to the university of Cadwailader C. Washburn of about $50,000, or so. Now, Washburn was a very distinguished person of Wisconsin in those days. In fact, he was the governor of the state 1872 to 1874. And while governor, he had the legislature pass a provision that foresaw the donation by somebody yet to be identified of a telescope and observatory building to the university. The legislation said that at such time that somebody made that donation, that the state would then hire an astronomer and see to the upkeep of the observatory, essentially take over the operations and provide that ongoing operating costs if somebody stepped up to provide the facility. Of course, I don't know how long the line outside his office was, anybody who wanted to donate that kind of money. 
But probably, he had himself in mind all along. And after he left office, he fulfilled the terms of his own legislation by donating a sum, that in the end, came to about $50,000 for the construction of this observatory and the acquisition of the telescope for the observatory. Rightfully, it was then named after him. Washburn was a very interesting fellow because he was quite wealthy. He started out in Wisconsin. He came from out east in Maine. He came here as a land agent. In those days, that was not necessarily a term of endearment for a lot of people. His job was to come here and find choice parcels of land that he could buy from the owners on behalf of eastern investors, who then hoped, of course, to re-sell later on at higher values. He was the middle man, land agents in those days. 
He did a lot of work on the western frontier, as you could imagine. But he later moved into the milling business and founded Washburn Milling. He had a string of flour mills that stretched along the railroad line, from LaCrosse up to Minneapolis. And that milling company, which was later known as Crosby Washburn Milling Company, eventually acquired a few other mills in the Minneapolis area, and re-named itself General Mills. And you'll still find their products all over your local grocery store, of course. So Washburn was really the founder of what would become General Mills. And the money that he was making in that period to pay for the observatory really came from his milling business, rather than from his earlier career as a land agent. Washburn clearly had some kind of an interest in developing the university. He actually made his home here in Madison. Of course, a fellow that wealthy was able to have several homes. 
And one of his was in LaCrosse, which was where he was eventually buried. His home in Madison here was called Edgewood. And when he died, he gave that estate to the order of nuns that now runs Edgewood College. So that plot of land over there, if you know Edgewood College, that was Washburn's estate here in Madison. Why was Washburn motivated to donate such a large sum of money to the university to create an observatory? He was not a scientist, for example. It's hard to know. We don't really have much in the way of documentary insight into what Washburn was thinking of accomplishing. But he clearly wanted to accomplish something. This was a period when the idea of what we now call a research university was becoming a concept in people's minds. 
The model of a university, not of a tradition, one could almost say medieval university, where the job was to transmit a body of knowledge to another generation, but a new mission for a university that, while you're transmitting culture from generation to generation, you're building it. You're improving it and criticizing the old, sifting and winnowing, right? This was in the air in the United States at the time. And universities were beginning to model themselves on German research universities. Johns Hopkins is a good example in the United States. It's usually identified as the first research university in the U.S. And people like Washburn were probably thinking in terms of a model like this. It was important for the University of Wisconsin to grow in this direction. And you don't have a research university without research institutions. And the observatory in the 19th century was seen as kind of the way a biotech lab probably is today. It's seen as the status, research establishment research symbol. 
An observatory in those days held that role. So having an observatory for the University of Wisconsin would have been important for those reasons. But we don't have Washburn's words on that. In any case, he clearly wanted it to be an important symbol for the university. One of his requirements in his donation to the university of this sum to build the observatory, was that the telescope that the university acquired had to be bigger than Harvard's, which turned out to be an interesting requirement. In those days, telescopes, research telescopes, were not the kind of telescopes we build today, which typically have large mirrors which collect the light. And as you know, the big telescopes, the largest telescopes that astronomers are constructing these days have mirrors that are something like 10 meters in diameter. So, very big mirrors that collect light from distant astronomical sources. In those days, research telescopes were refracting telescopes. They used a lens at the front of the telescope. 
And you can't make a lenses anywhere near as big as you can make mirrors. Mirrors are popular now for reasons that would constitute a different talk. But in those days, refractors were the type of instruments. Harvard University had, still has today, a 15-inch refractor. That means that the lens at the front of that telescope is 15 inches in diameter, the size of a nice dinner plate. That telescope had been acquired from Germany in the 1840s, which is where you had to go to get a good telescope in those days. You couldn't really get research quality optics in the United States. They imported it. By the late 1870s, when the University of Wisconsin was shopping for a telescope, you could get the best telescopes in the world in the United States from Alvan Clark and Sons in Massachusetts. They were, in fact, supplying telescopes to a good bit of the rest of the world. 
They were the best telescopes you could get. In those days, the largest telescope in the United States was the one at the U.S. Naval Observatory, which had a lens of 24 inches in diameter, so a pretty good sized lens. The second largest telescope in the United States was the 18-inch refractor, which belonged to the Dearborn Observatory, which was in Chicago. Not very far from us. It had an 18-inch lens, a pretty good sized lens. The third largest in the country was Harvard University with their great 15-inch refractor. So the Board of Regents at the University of Wisconsin, and whoever placed the order, ordered a 15-1/2 inch lens from Alvan Clark and Sons in Massachusetts. We had a telescope bigger than Harvard's, and we never let them forget it. But it was actually a very cagey move. Because just as I just gave you the order of the observatories, they've always been listed that way, according to the size of the telescope. 
So after Washburn Observatory opened, we displaced Harvard. They went one down on the list. And we're above them. And even in those days, that brought us to prominence in a way that no other half-inch of glass could ever have done. 
(laughter)
 Now, I won't talk too long about this, but just as another example of philanthropy in those days. Cyrus Woodman was a business associate of Washburn's, and was very interested in contributing to Washburn's project of establishing an observatory for the university. And he established, not a direct contribution to the observatory in the physical sense, but created an endowment. He endowed $5,000 so that the observatory could establish a library. Again, maybe this is an insight into thinking. 
These guys are clearly thinking of institution building, what do we need to do here to create a credible institution that's not just a status symbol. The Woodman fund there still produces interest today for the acquisition of books and journals for the Astronomy Department library, which is now called the Woodman Astronomical Library. So, Woodman, a good friend of Washburn there left his imprint on there, as well. Okay, fine, so you've got yourself an observatory. You've got yourself a telescope. Now the state is going to hire an astronomer. And where do you go to get an astronomer? Well, in our case, we went to the University of Michigan and stole theirs. Now, Watson was a very famous astronomer in those days. James Watson, one of the first generation of American-trained astronomers in those days, had gotten his PhD at Michigan from a German-trained astronomer. 
Watson was very interested in the problem of the planet Vulcan, and in fact had discovered Vulcan. He was famous as the discoverer of Vulcan. I hope you're all saying, "Vulcan," is that where Mr. Spock was from. Is that the one? Vulcan was the solution to a problem in astronomy in those days. By those days, I mean the mid-19th century, 1850s and 1860s. Mercury didn't behave itself quite the way Newton laws predicted that it should. Now, all the other planets behaved the way Newton's laws suggested they should. Although, there was that little problem with Uranus. 
And in the 1840s, the motion of Uranus didn't seem quite to obey Newton's laws. And a French astronomer was able to analyze the motion of Uranus and say, well, it would obey Newton's laws if there were another planet out there that was exerting a force that we're not accounting for. And he was able to infer about where it ought to be, and suggested to the Berlin Observatory that if you look at a certain place in the sky, you might find another planet. They set out on a search, taking star charts that had been recently made, to look in the sky and compare what he saw in the telescope with what he saw in the charts. He saw an object that wasn't on the chart. Son of a gun, that turned out to be the planet Neptune. So Neptune was discovered by the discrepancy between the observed motions of Uranus and what Newton's laws would predict. He was able to theoretically predict the existence of the planet Neptune. 1846, a huge triumph of Newtonian science, right? Well, what about that problem with Mercury, which was known? 
Mercury doesn't quite work either. Well, the obvious solution is that there's probably a planet closer to the sun. Now, Mercury is hard to see. Has anybody ever seen Mercury? I have to ask. One. I'm surprised, frankly. About one out of a hundred is what I usually find. Mercury is very hard to see. Very hard to see in the sky. 
Most people have never seen Mercury, or at least have not known they were seeing it at the time. It's always close to the sun, so you have to look right about sunset or just before dawn. And you only see it for just a little while. And it's lost, always in a bright twilight. You have to know right where to look at it. Something even closer to the sun would be even harder to see. So it was not unreasonable to think in those days that there might be a yet undiscovered planet even closer to the sun than Mercury. But how are you going to find it? It's hard enough to see Mercury. The solution was, at least one way to look for it, was to wait until a total solar eclipse, when the moon covers up the sun during the daytime. 
Then you can scan the sky. You can see the stars and planets in the sky in the vicinity of the sun. So in 1876, James Watson is one of many astronomers who went to an eclipse expedition in the western United States where they, in the techniques available to them in those days, which did not really include photography as a good option, quickly, in the couple of minutes that they had while the sky was dark, looking at his charts, looking at the sky, he discovered Vulcan. And he reported it as such. He gained great fame. Now, of course, there's a little bit of a problem, in that you guys all know that there is no Vulcan. If there were, you would've learned that in school, right? Watson died rather soon after coming to the University of Wisconsin. This famous astronomer. We lured him away to the new observatory. 
He came here in 1878. And before the observatory was even finished, although he worked very hard on it, probably worked himself to death on it. He died in 1880, not knowing that his discovery of Vulcan in the solar eclipse of 1876 had been a complete mistake. Nobody really knows what he saw. But a couple of other observers were doing the same sorts of things, and also thought they had discovered planets in the vicinity of the sun. And it probably just has to do with the great difficulty under pressure of comparing objects on star charts with objects you see in the sky. No doubt, they confused some star, or possibly and asteroid that shouldn't have been there, according to star charts. At any rate, Watson was very famous because of this. He came to the University of Wisconsin, and with his own money, built the student observatory that I mentioned to you. This is the view from the top of what is now the LaFollette School. 
Some of you probably know it that way. In those days, it was the home of the director of the observatory. And so, it was Watson's home. This photograph was taken looking west at the eastern face of the observatory here. This student observatory is right there. You see the 15-inch refractor poking through the dome. And just down the hill here, you can make out the corner of the solar observatory right there that you saw in the engraving a few minutes ago. Watson built the solar observatory at his own expense, the student observatory at his own expense. He died in 1880. He never really put any of this to use, including, by the way, the solar observatory was to confirm his observation of Vulcan. 
He hoped to observe the sky, not only during solar eclipses, but on an every day basis. He thought he had a technique that would allow him to find Vulcan. We has never able to put that to work. Here is a view, a photograph. It's the western side of the observatory looking east. You see Bascom Hall right there. It has the dome. That was before the fire up there on Bascom Hill. And the observatory, the main dome, is almost washed out against the sky. Here is the Watson Solar Observatory right there. 
And this was at the Watson Observatory. It looks like a much later photograph. It was essentially abandoned shortly after Watson. And I'll talk about it in just a moment. It stayed on campus until the late 1940s, at which point they decided it was too much of a nuisance. They got rid of it. All right, so we're leaving the Washburn Observatory here at just about 1880. And who are you going to get to observe, to operate an observatory. They hired a fellow, William Holden to take over. I'll have a picture of him in just a moment. 
I'm didn't want to leave you in suspense there. The observatory was, at that time, a landmark on campus, like you saw from the previous photos. And its landmark status is sort of indicated by what was a popular song in the 1930s. Johnny Burke here was an alum of the university. He wrote this song, which is said to be about our observatory. ? ? ? IT'S DARK ? ? 
ON OBSERVATORY HILL ? ? COME ON, LET'S PRETEND ? ? WE'RE JACK AND JILL ? ? YOU'LL STROLL TO THE HILLTOP ? ? WHERE COLLEGE SWEETHEARTS GO ? ? 
AND LOOK AT THE LIGHTS ? ? ON THE CAMPUS DOWN BELOW ? ? YOU'LL LEARN ? ? WHAT ASTRONOMY IS FOR ? ? AND WE'LL LEARN ? ? 
WHAT THE STARS ? ? CAN HAVE IN STORE ? ? I KNOW IN ADVANCE ? ? THAT THE MOON ? ? MAY MEAN ROMANCE ? ? 
WHEN IT'S DARK ? ? ON OBSERVATORY HILL ?- So, clearly a research institution of some fame 
(light laughter)
 by that period. It actually was a research institution of some fame, but not because of its attraction for the students, but because of the scientists who worked there. Watson was succeeded by a fellow who'd been working here with him, Edward Holden. He had come out from the U.S. Navy Observatory. He was here for a few years. 
And he moved very quickly on out, just after four years here at the university. He became the first president of the University of California, and the first director of their Lick Observatory, which had a much bigger telescope than ours. In the 1880s, I think 1887, or so, that became active. Holden was succeeded by a fellow who was working here with him at the time, George Comstock. He carried on the work at Washburn observatory right up into that era, just about the time when the Dorsey Brothers would have recorded that song. I don't actually know when it was published. George Comstock became a very prominent astronomer. He was a co-founder of the American Astronomical Society. The AAS was very important in shaping the way graduate work is done here at the university. He was using an observatory that was built in the 1880s, at a period when astronomy itself was changing very dramatically into what we now call astrophysics. 
The Washburn Observatory was built right on the cusp of this change. And something that's special about the Washburn Observatory is that the telescope there, that you can normally visit-- As you may know right now, the observatory is being renovated and you can't actually visit it. Usually, I can invite you to go up there. On a regular basis, it's open to the public. But not right now, until summer, 2009, when it should reopen. That telescope was designed specifically for an astronomer to look through, for the human eye to be the instrument, to be the detector for that telescope. It was designed to optimize the view by the human eye. Now, that's not true, in fact that was beginning to change very rapidly. You probably know that the largest refracting telescope in the world is here in Wisconsin. It's down on Lake Geneva at Williams Bay. 
The University of Chicago built the Yerkes Observatory there, with a donation from Charles Yerkes. They installed a very large refracting telescope, 40 inches in diameter. The lens is huge. In fact, it's the largest in the world. That telescope was not built for the human eye. That telescope was built for photographic film. It's optimized for photography, not for visual observers. So you'll get a better image with a telescope that's designed for the human eye. And in an era when astronomy was switching over to new techniques, photography, for example, spectroscopy for example, photometry which I'll talk about in just a moment, for example. George Comstock was working here at the university with a telescope designed for another era. 
And Comstock's work is not particularly well known, because he was limited by the instrumentation that he had here to continue the work that had been foreseen in the 19th century. But it turned out not to be the direction that astronomy would be going. Comstock was succeeded, however, by a member of the next generation, who was thinking in terms of research in the new thinking of astrophysics. Stebbins had studied here at Madison with Comstock. He had gone on to work out there at Lick Observatory, where Holden had gone. He became the observatory director at the University of Illinois, our neighbor. And at Illinois, we began experimenting with new technology. This was in the 19-teens, at the time of World War I, in that era. Stebbins began experimenting with a cousin of the radio tube. Now, of course, this was the great age of radio, developing in the 1920s into a huge phenomenon. 
Electronics, with it's fundamental active element, the radio tube, electronics was a new technology. Stebbins was working with a cousin of the radio tube that could detect light. You'll see some examples of these things in our exhibit next door here. Stebbins was designing tubes that were sensitive to light. The light, photons of light, would pass into this tube. The photons would free up electrons from a surface usually coated with, oh, something like cesium, or some sort of rare metals. The metals, when they would absorb some light, give off some electrons. And the electrons, you can measure in an electrical circuit. So, you can measure light by electronic measurements. And in fact, if you illuminate the tube with twice the amount of light that you had before, you'll get twice the current. 
In other words, you can actually measure, in what astronomers call a linear fashion, the relative intensities of light sources, either two light sources that you can look at one after another, or the single light source, if it's varying over time. If you have a variable star, how much brighter is it now than it was an hour ago. Photography actually can't answer that question very well for you. But these photometers, the first of their kind, could answer questions like that. So this technology that Stebbins and one other fellow in the world, there were only two of them working on it, and he was in Germany, the other fellow, working on this technology in those days. Stebbins started developing this technology in Illinois. He then brought it to Madison and continued the development work here, using the Washburn telescope. He attached photometers that would he would design and test in a laboratory, working with the physics department. He worked with some people in the physics department, and also with a physicist that he had been working with at the University of Illinois. They developed what he used to call electric astronomy, this light measuring ability, developing this into a practical technique. 
At first, it could only detect the brightest stars. But his photometers steadily got more sensitive over the years, and became useful for a number of different kinds of measurements. A very important aspect of this was his partnership with his student, Albert Whitford, who started working with Stebbins in the 1930s, about the time that Whitford was getting his degree in physics here from the university. Whitford was able to design amplifiers that could work with Stebbins' photometers. It made it possible to measure very dim stars, and produce photometry on very dim stars. Now, there are two advantages of that. One, is that you can look at dimmer stars. The other advantage, though, is that you can look at brighter objects and you can throw away most of their light. Why would you want to do that? Well, because what you would probably like to know is how bright is this star in red light, compared to how bright this star is in blue light. 
So to measure the red, you have to throw away everything else. And then to measure the blue, you have to throw away everything else. So you're taking a bright star and throwing a good bit of light, your photometer has to be sensitive enough to detect just one part of a star's spectrum. And that was a very important technique that they developed here at Wisconsin, the ability to look at a star and measure the relative intensity of that star's light at the red and blue ends of the spectrum. Why is that important? That's important because light, as it passes through a medium is affected by its passage through the medium. You see that every night at sunset, right? You see the sun going down. It turns red because of the passage of light through the medium of our atmosphere. What's happening there is that the atmosphere, the medium, scatters the light from the sun. 
It scatters all the light from the sun. But it scatters much more effectively at the blue end of the spectrum than it does at the red end of the spectrum. So red is more scattered out. And the light that reaches us is predominantly red by that point, relatively red, compared to when it started out. So the light is reddened by the scattering of the medium. So now suppose you looked at a star. You can tell, it turns out, from the spectrum of a star, how red it should be. So now a Stebbins-Whitford photometer can look at a star and determine whether it's redder than it should be. They call that reddening. And the reddening tells you how much the starlight has been affected by the medium that's between you and the star, the interstellar medium. 
That's important because astronomers used to assume that space was empty, that there is no medium between us and the distant stars. But it turns out there is. And you can measure its effects with Stebbins and Whitford's techniques. That had a really practical impact. Just to give you one example, the size of the galaxy. We often talk about the size of the galaxy, how big our galaxy is, how far we are from the center. How do we know that? Well, that was figured out in the 1920s by one of our friends at Harvard, Harlowe Shapley, who measured the distances, I should say estimated, the distances of a type of star cluster called a globular cluster and the distribution on the sky. But Shapley, because he had no way to measure the effects of the interstellar medium, assumed that there was none. But it turns out there is. 
And Stebbins was able to measure how reddened the cluster light is, and how much of their dimming was because of their distance and how much was because of the interstellar medium. And it turns out that Shapley's distances were all exaggerated. The galaxy was only about half the size that the Shapley model had made it. So Stebbins is said to have been proud to have reduced the size of the galaxy by about half by his technique. So just an example of the practical implications of this in astronomy these days. So Washburn observatory really was a spot where modern astrophysics began to take shape, despite the vision of it, up to about the Comstock period of it as a classical astronomical institution. Stebbins brought Washburn Observatory and what would become the UW Astronomy Department to the modern era of astrophysics. Now, that transition, though, is a lot more complicated than just Stebbins' photometry. In those days, by which I mean up to about the Stebbins-Whitford era, the observatory was not an astronomy department. The observatory was a research institution that reported directly to the chancellor. 
They did teach courses, and they did give degrees. But it didn't have a status as a university department. That makes a big difference for a lot of things. Albert Whitford, in the 1950s, as director, was very important in a number of ways at the development of the Astronomy Department as we see it today. And a big part of it was that he oversaw the transition of the observatory from a research institute into a department, as a department of the College of Letters and Science. Another very important thing he did was acquire the university's first new telescope since the Washburn telescope in 1881. In the 1950s, Albert Whitford oversaw the creation of, funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, funded by WARF, the establishment of Pine Bluff Observatory, which is about 20 miles west of Madison. It has a 36-inch reflecting telescope. So it's a mirror. It's a reflecting telescope. 
But it's quite a bit bigger aperture than the 15-1/2 inch that we have here on campus. Many other important things were happening in the '50s, too, that would position the university's astronomers to move in a completely new direction from Washburn's original vision. And part of that is into the southern hemisphere, which I'll explain in a few minutes. But another part of that is into space. It turns out that without knowing it, that Stebbins and Whitford had set up the University of Wisconsin to be in a perfect position to exploit Sputnik. In 1957, of course the world is shocked by the Russians being the first ones to successfully put something in orbit. The Russians, of all people. So it became important in this country for us to put things in orbit, too. Now, the obvious things are what we were all worried the Russians were putting up there, like weapons. But NASA, the agency entrusted by the U.S. government to develop space technologies, NASA wanted to make sure that we were doing civilian things, as well. 
It sent out a letter to astronomers in about 1958, saying what would you do if you could put something into space. What kind of astronomical stuff, whatever you guys do, could be done in space? A fellow named Art Code, who at that time was at Cal Tech, responded, among a number of others who became famous in the development of space astronomy as well. And Art Code, who had been a student here at the University of Wisconsin for a time, and knew about the expertise here on photometry, proposed building a small satellite. Now Art tells me that this gadget here was designed to be, and it looks remarkably like, one of those sort of bullet-shaped garbage cans that you see around. I guess probably only a few remember, but they stand about that high and they have this bullet shape. You can see it there. He said it should be fairly simple. You just take a small telescope. You take a photometer, which they know how to build there at Wisconsin. 
And you put some solar panels on it. You provide it some electricity. Arrange for it to transmit its data by radio down to the ground. It's fairly cheap. It cost you know, $100,000, or something like that. If it doesn't work, no problem. They liked that idea. This was just at the time when Art Code was coming to Wisconsin. He was hired as a successor to Albert Whitford here as director of Washburn Observatory. And he brought this whole concept and funding that NASA was sending to the university. 
And the University of Wisconsin became the place to go to for astronomical photometry that was now going into space. Obviously, that had big advantages over photographic film. What are you going to do with photographic film in space? There were some schemes where I know they dropped film back to earth on parachutes and things like that. But come on! The thing to do is to have an electronic instrument, like a photometer that you transmit its results down to the ground. So the expertise here at the University of Wisconsin developed into the first generation of astronomical observatories. And this is what Art Code's bullet-garbage can turned into. I've always wished that there was a person in here to give you scale. But it won't be a problem, because you can walk into our exhibit area over here. 
We have this gadget sitting over there, full scale. It's roughly 12 feet tall. This is the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2. There were a series of OAOs. The OAO 2 was the first one intended to be a more or less general purpose astronomical observatory. And it's primary instrument for observing was a package of Wisconsin photometers and telescopes that were inside there. NASA builds the whole vehicle. Wisconsin supplies the scientific instrument package. It flies into space. Here's the Wisconsin Experiment Package, as it was called, the WEP, which consisted of five telescopes, one large and four smaller ones here, and two spectroscopes. 
And now why bother to do this in space? Well because above the earth's atmosphere, you can see light and parts of the spectrum that you can't see from the earth's surface. The earth's atmosphere, fortunately for us, is opaque to things like x-rays and ultraviolet radiation. But astronomers are very interested in what happens to stars, for example, when you look at them in the ultraviolet. It tells you a lot. But nobody could tell what happened to stars in the ultraviolet sitting here on the surface of the earth. So the idea is to harness this new technology, space vehicles, couple them with the well-understood technology of electronic photometry here at Wisconsin and get some photometers out there to start seeing what the universe looked like in ultraviolet. Now what the universe looked like in ultraviolet would also be interesting if you could make images of the things you see, not just measure their brightness. So our friends at Harvard supplied the other major instrument on the OAO, which they called the celescope. And this was a very ambitious instrument that was sort of ahead of its time. 
It didn't really work very well at all. So the primary instrument for science on the OAO, which operated for quite a number of years as a general purpose astronomical observatory, in the sense of a, really, a predecessor to the Hubble Space Telescope, was the Wisconsin Experiment Package, which you'll also see sitting over here next to the OAO in our exhibit space. So the OAO was launched, to over-simplify here a little bit, because there was actually a previous unsuccessful OAO that exploded in orbit. But not our fault. We won't go into that. But a successful OAO was launched in 1968. So about ten years after the first concept that Art Code had proposed to NASA. It served for many years in orbit. Now the object that we have on display is not the original one, because the OAO is still in orbit. In those days, I should say these days, we put things in low earth orbits, so unless you try very hard to keep them up there, they kind of automatically fall back down. 
Their orbits degrade and they fall back down. The space station, if it didn't get a push, every time the shuttle visits it, they give it a little nudge to raise the orbit some. Then it lowers and lowers. If we just forget about the space station and go away from it, it'll clean itself out of orbit eventually in a very spectacular way. But in those days, the OAO was put into a much higher orbit, about 400 miles up, which is quite stable. It will stay there, probably, for centuries. And it's still up there. But we have its backup sitting over here, an identical backup unit, sitting next door in our exhibit area. So this was the real fruit here, not the real fruit, but this was one of the most spectacular outcomes of the Whitford-Stebbins technologies that developed up there on Observatory Hill. What did the OAO do? 
I'll just give you one example. If somebody, if you read about comets, one of the things you'll surely read is what comets are made of. And they'll tell you that comets are primarily water. In fact, it's thought that a substantial amount of the water in our ocean, and hence the water that makes us up probably arrived on earth after its formation, during an early period of comet bombardment. And the water of comets is a substantial component, if not almost all of the water in our ocean. How do we know that comets are made of water? If somebody tells you that, how do you know that? Well, OAO discovered that. Because with the Wisconsin payload, it was possible to observe comets and discover something that can't be seen from the earth, which is there's a huge halo around the visible part of the comet. This normally invisible halo is water breakdown products, ions that form from the breakdown of water in the ultraviolet light from the sun. 
So the casual statement that you'll easily see and read about comets, that they're mostly water, that comes from the OAO. A fundamental insight into, not just the nature of comets, but maybe how we got here ourselves. Well, this is, in many ways I already referred to the Hubble Space Telescope, which the OAO was in some sense, an ancestor of. The Hubble Space Telescope is by now very famous. And it went into orbit with a Wisconsin photometer package aboard it. There are four possible instrument bays back in this part of the telescope. There are actually three other ones around here. But when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, it went up there with a package of photometers that was built here at the University of Wisconsin. Once again, here's the instrument package itself. It's called the High Speed Photometer. 
And the High Speed Photometer clearly is another outgrowth of this technology that we understand here. In this case, photometers that were optimized. As it says, they're high speed, to watch rapidly changing events. So this instrument was built here specifically for the Hubble Space Telescope. It was a first generation instrument and has long been taken out of the Hubble Space Telescope. There's the space telescope being deployed in orbit. Ultraviolet observations are and continue to be of great importance. And another space instrument that comes out of this whole tradition is the one called the Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo-Polarimter Experiment. It's much more fun to say WUPPE. WUPPE was part of an instrument package that was designed for missions in which a space shuttle would be transformed into an astronomical observatory. 
And this package of instruments was originally designed to fly about six times on the space shuttle. Now WUPPE, here it is right there in its sort of cartoon form. It did eventually fly twice. I'll tell you why in a minute. It's also out in our exhibit area, so you can go out there and see WUPPE and see that it survived rather nicely its two flights on the space shuttle. Now WUPPE's distinction, WUPPE is an ultraviolet photometer. But there are many directions a photometer can go. And Art Code here, who clearly was a pretty amazing human being, still is. Art just moved back to Madison after retiring to Arizona for a while. Art recognized that you can do more than just spectral measurements with photometers. 
You can measure how the light of an astronomical source is polarized. The same effect that you see in Polaroid sunglasses. If you take your Polaroid sunglasses and look up into the blue sky, away from the sun, and rotate them, you'll see that the skylight is polarized. It gets lighter and darker as you rotate your Polaroid sunglasses. A more refined nature of that allows you to measure the degree of polarization, which again, tells you a lot about, for instance, scattering that the light has experienced on its way to you, to the detector. And WUPPE's main strength here was to measure the polarization vectors in light from extraterrestrial forces. So WUPPE was specialized. This was the first time this had ever been done in the ultraviolet, where the polarization is particularly strong and interesting. You can only do that from orbit. You can only do that with a technology like we understand how to do here at Wisconsin. 
It was built into WUPPE, which was ready to fly here in January 1986. Many of you will remember that was a really terrible month in the space program. That's when the Challenger exploded. This is the payload being lowered into the shuttle bay for the next mission, the one that was to follow the Challenger. But as you probably also know, there were no shuttle flights then for years afterwards. The entire thinking of NASA changed as a result of the Challenger experiment. And the six missions that WUPPE and its companion instruments were to fly were reduced to two. And WUPPE did fly two of those missions. In the days when there should have been six missions, there were going to be a lot of astronomers who were going to fly, then of course on the crew missions. And one of our astronomy professors, Ken Nordsieck, was on the flight manifest, and was in astronaut training to fly on one of those WUPPE missions. 
He went through the whole astronaut training bit. But his flight was one of those that was cancelled. So, Ken is qualified to be an astronaut, but did not fly. Probably won't fly his WUPPE in space. WUPPE is kind of buried behind these other instruments here. But I really like this picture, because you can see Orion out there looking at the space shuttle. Another branch of the Stebbins-Whitford technology development came from smaller instruments than the ones that I've just been talking about, like the OAO, the Hubble Space Telescope and WUPPE. There's actually a much cheaper way to put payloads in space than launching them into orbit. And that is launching them aboard what are called suborbital rockets. As you can tell from the name, that means they don't quite make it to orbit. 
Instead of getting into orbit around the earth, which takes a much bigger rocket, you could just take a small rocket and shoot it straight up, as high as you can make it go. And if you just let it do that, it'll go up, it'll slow down, and it will fall back down to the earth's surface. Once again, it won't go into orbit. You can do that with a relatively small rocket, and get it to go up a couple hundred miles high. The drawback, of course, is that it's only there for about five minutes. It pops up above the earth's atmosphere and then falls back down. But the big advantage is that it costs a tiny fraction of what it costs to put a satellite into orbit. So it's a really good way to test instruments, to develop new instruments, to put them on suborbital rockets. That has been a strength of the UW operation since the early days of OAO. We still build a number of suborbital rocket instruments for many applications. 
And we have a specialty, also now, in the technology of suborbital rocketry. For example, it isn't quite as simple as I said, of course. You launch that thing up there. It's up there for five minutes. It opens the doors to observe whatever your target is in the heavens, with whatever instrument you've got. How do you point at this object? And make up your mind fast, because you're coming right back down again, right? The University Space Astronomy Lab is developing a technology, has developed and successfully tested a technology called the Star Tracker 5000, which does that job really nicely and does a lot of other things, as well. It's almost surely going to become a standard piece of technology, not just for suborbital rockets, but also for orbital instruments in the very near future. We're very excited about that, and expecting to see it play a major role in space technology, an outgrowth of our suborbital rocket work here at Wisconsin. 
Well, so all this talk about space. I bet you thought we'd forgotten about doing astronomy from the ground. But in fact, no. The Pine Bluff Telescope that I mentioned, the 36-inch telescope that went in in the mid-1950s was a respectable telescope of that era. But telescopes have gotten a lot bigger. And that's driven, not by the ability to make them, but by what astronomers need to look at. It's almost always about looking at ever dimmer light sources. And whether that's members of the solar system that are ever smaller on the outskirts of the solar system, or whether that's galaxies that are dim because they're in distant parts of the universe. We're seeing the light as they appeared when the universe was a fraction of its current age. For whatever reason, smaller, dimmer objects are always on the frontier. 
And that always means bigger telescopes to collect more light. So that 36-inch Pine Bluff telescope really is no longer a research class telescope in many respects. And the university got its first, I should say its next large telescope in the 1980s, with the construction of this one, the WIYN Telescope. WIYN stands for Wisconsin Indiana Yale and the NOAO. The telescopes like this are expensive enough now that it's usually only practical to build them by consortiums. Either that, or you find somebody who's got a lot of money to donate. That occasionally happens, too. The CAPP Telescopes, for example, that are quite famous now, were obviously created with tech money. A consortium is a very interesting way to build a telescope for a lot of different reasons. Obviously, there are problems with varying demands from different parties who want to do different things with the telescope. 
But they have a big advantage if you're a partner in a consortium telescope. Everybody wants to observe with these big telescopes. And usually the way that telescope time is allocated is by a competitive process. You submit a proposal. Some committee somewhere evaluates all those proposals. This is how it works for the Hubble Space Telescope, for example. You want to observe with the Hubble Space Telescope, which our astronomers do all the time, you submit a proposal. A committee ranks those things in order of the worthiness of the proposal and a few other criteria, like how practical it is and things like that. And then you start assigning telescope time off the top of the list. So good luck. 
Send in your proposal. See where you end up. Maybe that means nowhere, right? If you're a member of a consortium institution, it's like buying stock in a company. You get a fraction of the telescope time. So if we're a 25% partner in the WIYN telescope, then we get 25% of the nights in the year out there. This telescope, by the way, is on Kitt Peak out in Arizona. We will visit on the Alumni Association trip. 25% to be allocated here at Wisconsin, by our criteria, not somebody else's committee somewhere. So that means that graduate students here have a fair crack at big telescope time that would be difficult for them to get at a national level of competition. 
It means a lot of things for the research here at the university to be a member of a consortium like this. And WIYN is one of the finest, optically finest telescopes now operating in the world. In part because of its innovative design, which I don't want to go into right now. But in part also because of its location out on Kitt Peak, which was carefully selected so that the air that comes up the mountain moves slowly. They call it a laminar flow, a nice, smooth blanket of air that comes up the side of the mountain and flows over it. So when you look through that air, you don't see a lot of turbulence. And because of the two things, the advanced technology of WIYN, but also because of its wonderful spot out there on Kitt Peak, it produces some of the optically finest images in the world right now. All right, Wisconsin's technology has gone in a lot of different directions. This is an outgrowth. This instrument, also until very recently was out at Kitt Peak. 
It was developed here in Madison. The Wisconsin Hydrogen Alpha Mapper combines technologies from the Stebbins-Whitford tradition, but also from a specialty of our Physics Department, which is something called Fabry-Perot Spectroscopy. It has discovered parts of the galaxy that were undetected before, layers of ionized gas in our galaxy that when you map on a large scale, you can find. Right now, our big project is the Southern African Large Telescope, which is built as you can see it here, standing out in South Africa. It's in the southern hemisphere. It's a ten meters, or 11 meters, depending. The mirror is hexagonal, so you can either go between the flat sides and it's ten, of you can go by the points, if you want to exaggerate and say 11. I take the conservative approach. It's a ten-meter telescope in South Africa. It's the largest in the southern hemisphere, one of the largest in the world. 
Right now, we're not really making any new telescopes bigger than that, although there are plans about it in another generation to expand those significantly. And this, again, is a consortium telescope. The University of Wisconsin is the largest non-governmental partner. There are a couple governments. The biggest on being the government of South Africa, perhaps not surprisingly. We are a major part of this and contributing the primary instrument a spectroscope and polarimeter, which, once again, is related to all this technology. It's been developed at the university. It's a cousin of WUPPE, in a sense. That instrument is here in Madison now and will go to South Africa, I should say back to South Africa. It's here in Madison for some work. 
It will go back to South Africa fairly soon, in the next few weeks, I think is the plan, and be re-installed on the telescope. So this should soon become a major research opportunity for Wisconsin scientists, now, to explore the southern sky. A telescope like this should be capable of measuring the spectra of galaxies from some of the very early stages of galaxy formation after the big bang. So, real insights into what's going on. It's also capable of doing a census of relatively new stars in nearby dwarf galaxies that you can only see in the southern hemisphere, like the Magellanic Clouds. And it might seem a little odd. You can imagine, we've been looking at the sky for a long time now, even with telescopes and things. We have no census of the stars in our galaxy. We can only see the stars in our immediate neighborhood. So if somebody says, well, how many of those type B stars are there compared to type M stars. 
Don't know. I can't do that census in our galaxy. And you can't do that census in distant galaxies because the M stars are too dim to see in any other galaxy. But we are lucky to have a couple of dwarf galaxies nearby our own, the Magellanic Clouds is visible again, only in the southern hemisphere. They're close enough to do a census. We can actually see them all, and understand for the first time what the star population of a galaxy really is like. That's work that will be carried out down here at SALT by Wisconsin astronomers, for example. So I will leave you there, I think. Oh, this is the instrument. I'll leave you here. 
That's the instrument that will be put onto the top of the SALT telescope, way up there high in the air above that ten meter mirror, to do work like I was just talking about, various sorts of things, spectroscopy of distant galaxies, spectrotypes of interstellar census and things like that. And I thank you very much for your attention. 
(applause)
 Question?- The size of the Astronomy Department here at the UW? I don't know much, other than a class I took in the 1960s. 
(laughter)

- Well, the Astronomy Department here has a very good national reputation. We have a number of research strengths in galaxies and galaxy evolution, for example, in star formation, and star forming systems, as well as in technical instrument building work. So I'm not sure where we rank, but certainly in the top rank of astronomy departments in the U.S. Also, in terms of funded research, externally funded research, we rank very high. 
Faculty members, about a dozen. Let me think here for a minute, but probably about a dozen faculty members and 30 to 40 graduate students. So, not a huge department by a long shot. But an important department on campus. Yeah?- I vaguely remember something about the Hubble Telescope, a problem or something with it. What was that about?- Right, that was immediately after they launched the Hubble. The first data that started coming down from it, all the images were fuzzy. And so there was a lot of scratching of heads real quickly. 
And it turned out that the primary mirror, the resource that all the instruments shared, the primary mirror had the wrong shape. Now this was the most carefully made mirror in history. But it turned out that out there at Perkin-Elmer, they changed their name after this, honest. Perkin-Elmer, who made the mirror, had used a piece of test equipment that had a flaw built into it. So it was a perfect mirror, as defined by this flawed piece of test equipment. So well, what do you do now? It turns out that it's possible to correct a problem like that by inserting some extra optics. So what they did was choose an instrument to remove and put in another instrument, so to speak, in that spot. That instrument, though, was designed to, kind of like a Swiss Army knife, just sort of unfold and put optical elements in front of its companion instruments, the other three remaining. And that's what they did. 
They put "eyeglasses" in effect on that mirror. Corrective optics to correct the mirror flaw. Because it was one of the most carefully made telescopes in history, that problem was one of the best understood problems in history, as well. There was no problem creating a prescription to correct the flaw in the Hubble mirror. So the sad part of the story is that the instrument that NASA chose to remove to put in the corrective optics package was ours, the High Speed Photometer that we had built. And so we operated for a few months, I forget exactly how many months, before the first service mission went up. And the choice about what instrument to pull out, well, I'm sure it was a much vexed sort of choice. But suffice it to say that they left the instruments that produced pretty pictures. And the ones that produce a little bit abstract, but nonetheless important data, ours, as the one that came out. So the High Speed Photometer was sacrificed in order to put in the corrective optics. 
And everything that you've seen from the Hubble Space Telescope since is a result of corrective optics. Now on subsequent generations of instruments, they would build-in the corrective optics into the instrument itself. So, and this is one of the reasons why that approach is pretty risky, although what else are you going to do. So you go up there now with a new instrument. There have been several generations of instruments now. It has its own corrective optics built-in. You put it in the telescope. And then, the corrective optic package has to withdraw just that one little finger that's holding some corrective optics in front of there. Fortunately, it all worked. If it had jammed part of the way in, then the whole telescope would be of questionable use. 
But they made that work. And now, all the instruments that are in there don't need it. None of the instruments in there need the corrective optics. And the corrective optics package itself has been removed and replaced by an instrument. So that's how that played out. That was the flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.- As a consultant, people making movies or writing novels, or anything. Do they come to the university to get information to see?- Sure, well, I don't know specifically about a consultant. I think, well, that's not true. 
There have been a couple cases. I couldn't give you details, right now. I know there have been a couple of cases where somebody making a documentary on, I'm going to say National Geographic, I'm not sure that's quite right, you know, has come looking for someone to comment on or comment on something, to provide some background or something along that line. It has happened from time to time. I don't think it happens in any organized way. In fact, if the approaches that I get from the press from time to time are any indication, it doesn't happen in any organized way at all. I mean, I think when somebody's making a documentary, and they say oh, who knows about galaxies, I don't know, I've got to talk to somebody about galaxies. And it's not clear how that kind of thing happens, except that, I suppose, by recommendations, or recommendations, or recommendations, or something along that line. So it has happened now and again. But I don't know.- 
Some of those things that are again, re-created in films, or something along those lines.- No, I can't think of any specific examples, but it does happen from time to time. But I don't know about any sort of fictional stuff like that. I can't think of a case. Let's see, a project I didn't talk about here that the Physics Department is doing. Sometimes I talk about it, because the Astronomy Department is partnering with Physics, is this ice cube project at the South Pole. There's an exhibit on that in there, too, that you'll see. That project has been the subject of at least one, or part of at least one documentary on science at the South Pole. And I remember that there was some, a good bit of documentary filming around here. In fact, they filmed some of it here at Space Place at the exhibit. 
So it just seems to come along on an ad hoc basis, when there's somebody who has a subject that has a Wisconsin connection, we hear from them. But I don't think in general. I think AAS has like a press office or something that makes recommendations. I don't know.- Do you partner at all, or do you help Memorial High School with their planetarium? Do you partner with high schools in that kind of situation?- Well, yeah, we do. That sort of falls under the outreach sort of operations that we do here at Space Place. And outreach is a disproportionate part of our, compared to other departments, of our department's activities. And it really goes back to the very earliest days of Washburn Observatory, when public nights at the observatory were routine from the very beginning. 
We do partner with the high schools in various sorts of ways. We've had, well, Memorial has a good planetarium. We have a good working relationship with them. We don't have a planetarium here. And the planetarium that the department has on campus is very old and antiquated. And it's unsatisfactory for a lot of reasons, including access. It doesn't have handicapped access right now. So we do mutual referrals to each other. We also do a lot of teacher education here. We've had a number of teacher workshops and things like that, where we've collaborated with the high schools on finding out what their sorts of needs are, and getting researchers to come and give workshops on what's going on, and what's the fundamental science behind certain interesting questions and things like that. 
We've also had a program that we called Scopes for Schools that involves building telescopes, which is a really good exercise, as you might imagine, in optics. We build a pretty nice telescope with high school, or sometimes middle school kids. And that has both a teacher training aspect to it and an instructional aspect, just in the building of the telescope and the workshop activities around that. Then the telescope stays with the school. And in at least a couple of the most successful cases, this has been the nucleus of an astronomy club at a couple schools I could point to. So, yeah, we have involvement at various levels with the local schools. 
(inaudible)
 The telescope is not going to be touched, the 15-1/2 inch. And in fact, the entire interior of the dome, in fact the entire dome itself is going to remain untouched, except that I think they're going to repaint the balcony on the outside. The rest of the building, there's going to be extensive work to rearrange the office spaces in there, and to upgrade, I guess replace is maybe the right word, all the air handling, the heating and cooling. 
They're going to put in an elevator so that there's handicapped access, not to the telescope dome, which turned out to be impractical, although we tried, but access to what will be office space in the newly renovated basement. So there'll be access from the sidewalk, and in between the first floor and the basement of that building, which is going to be occupied by the Honors Program of Letters and Science. So they will be moving in there. And there will be a lot of students coming and going. And there will be a lot of faculty coming and going up there. That will be the home of them. It hasn't been the home of the Astronomy Department since the 1950s. The Astronomy Department moved out of there, except for the telescope and some storage space here and there. The Astronomy Department moved out of there. That was again, Albert Whitford in about '56 or '57. 
They moved into the new wing of Sterling Hall, the east wing of Sterling Hall, which is still the core of the department, although, we're also in Chamberlin Hall, as well. And at that time, in the mid-1950s, the Institute for Research in the Humanities moved into the building. And that was the home of the Institute for Research in the Humanities until just this past year when they moved out for the renovation. Then the Honors Program will move in. So the plan for that, the predicted re-opening, is summer of 2009. I know that the Honors Program is expecting to do business with students there in the fall of 2009. So I guess there's some pressure to get that done on time. Other questions?- This is probably another lecture here, but since we have you here, what is the history of the Space Place and its connection to the Astronomy Department?- I can give you a short version of that. 
It really goes back to WUPPE and the High Speed Photometer, which means the early 1980s. The High Speed Photometer was about a $5 billion contract from NASA. WUPPE must have been comparable. I don't know, but it must've been about that. They came along, both at the same time, contracts to the university from NASA. And as I mentioned, we had an astronaut involved, a local guy involved. So as those projects developed in the mid-to-late '80s, we in the Astronomy Department, and specifically in the Space Astronomy Lab, which is the division that Art Code set up to handle this kind of specialized work within the Astronomy Department, we were literally besieged with requests, like, "Could you send out a speaker to tell us what's going on with all these wonderful things. Can we come visit the Space Astronomy Lab and see what's worked on here? Where would we park, by the way?" We had a huge demand. 
It was completely demand driven. We didn't start out to do outreach. It was sort of thrust upon us. And so, we started thinking about how to do that. And the opportunity came to move into an abandoned Ponderosa Steakhouse. Some of you will remember the old Space Place up there. The owner, who is a local property developer, was really interested in what was going on. It was almost one of those cocktail party discussions. He said well, nothing else is happening there. You can use that place for a while. 
He let us use it for a year. And it just really took off. We managed to find then rent, in succeeding years, to keep the place open. And between teacher workshops, and classroom visits, and public programs, the demand has been such that we just kept going. And time sort of flies. It's been 15 odd years since we started that up. So that's how it started. A really important part of that is that, and this was just starting to be important in the late 1980s to NASA. NASA had always had in mind the idea of outreach. But up until about that time, NASA's idea of outreach was that NASA prints out a truckload of posters and brochures and sends them to you and you hand them out. 
But the idea that maybe researchers themselves, and the institutions that support that research, like the university, ought to do research at a lower level, that is at the level of the individual project and its development, and the people involved in it and that kind of stuff. Just exactly what we were doing at Space Place. To answer curiosity about WUPPE and all that kind of stuff. NASA began to see that as an important way of doing research and making grants to programs, to individual research programs. So we began to get outreach money from NASA for all the NASA-funded research that we do here. That was a really important part, at least of the early days of Space Place. That made it possible to keep it running for a few years while we found other models to keep the operation going. That's now sort of a minor part of our funding, that NASA outreach funding. But that was an important component in there. And NASA started making it a criterion for proposals. 
When you would make a proposal to NASA, having a good outreach program gave your proposal a leg up. We could point an established outreach operation, going, in all the proposals that went to NASA. So it worked both ways. It was an advantage to the researchers to have an active outreach program going, because it made their proposals better. It's an advantage to the community, to NASA, and I think to the university as well, as a whole. Yeah?- What is the relationship between the Astronomy Department and the Space, Science and Engineering Center?- That's a good question. One of the branches that we could've taken in a talk like this is to talk about other things that were happening in the 1950s, as NASA looked for things to put in orbit, late 1950s, I should say. Because another response, I mentioned Art Code's response to NASA. 
Another response came from our Meteorology Department by a fellow named Verner Suomi. He proposed the development of meteorology satellites. And the first practical meteorology imaging, meteorology satellites, came from this campus. And in a similar, not exactly parallel way, but in a similar way that Art Code established the Space Astronomy Lab as part of the Astronomy Department to support the kind of technical development that had to happen for these projects to go, to accomplish the science that the faculty was interested in, over at the Meteorology Department, now known as the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department, they established a Space, Science and Engineering Center to support that kind of heavily technical work. And so that's where SSEC came from. They have since, the space science part, is mostly looking down at the earth. But their specialties have allowed them to get into other areas. So they had built important components, for example, of interplanetary probes. They built instruments that have measured the clouds on Jupiter and Venus, for examples, on probes that have been sent to those planets. So things that they know how to do, cloud density measurement and things like that, but applied to space science, in the sense of space exploration. 
That's how I would explain the relationship. There's another one here? Yeah.- The ten-meter telescope... 
(inaudible)

- That's quite right. I don't remember. There was probably no indication of that image of it, no. You're exactly right. It's very hard. 
In fact, it may be impossible with the current technology to make what they call a monolithic mirror of that size. And so, this mirror is what they call a mosaic mirror. It's 90 one-meter hexagons. So you tile those all together, like hexagonal bathroom tile, to make a huge hexagon. It allows you to get a big mirror. It has a number of drawbacks, like how do you keep all those things aligned, and all that kind of stuff. But they've solved all those types of problems. So it's a mosaic mirror. You're quite right. Okay, well thanks very much. 
I encourage you to go next door here and take a look at our exhibits. I think you'll see some things in there now that you recognize. And thanks for listening so carefully. 
(applause)