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The Greatest Show in the Universe
From NEBRASKA ALUMNUS January/February 1985
M13. That's short for the 13th object in Messier's catalog of celestial bodies, published in 1784. That's one way of looking at it. But a better way is to recognize it for what it is--a hazy cluster of stars, overlapping in the center and thinning out at the edges. Hundreds of thousands of them like diamond dust on black velvet more than 20,000 light years away ...
It's called a globular cluster, and if you were in its midst, said Don Taylor, UNL professor of astronomy, "You could read your newspaper by starlight."
Taylor is standing in semi-darkness next to the 30-inch telescope in UNL's Behlen Observatory located at the University's Mead Field Laboratory, about 35 miles from Lincoln. His commentary is for the benefit of those waiting to peer through the telescope's eyepiece for a glimpse of M13. A line of visitors, ranging in age from 5 to 70 or more, stretches up the helical staircase from the second floor of the observatory tower's connecting support building.
All are waiting to see what has to be the greatest show in the universe, at least as seen on the third planet from our sun on this clear October night in Mead, Nebraska.
The telescope is a stubby white barrel pointed skyward through an opening in the tower's revolvable, domed roof. The instrument is attached to a heavy "polar" axis that Taylor said is mounted parallel to the earth's axis. The polar axis is driven by a motor that turns the telescope once every sidereal day (about 23 hours and 56 minutes) in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation. This, according to Taylor, allows the telescope, once it is fixed on a star, to follow it across the sky during the course of the night. Taylor is one of three astronomers, all members of the faculty in UNL's department of physics and astronomy, who are hosts for this semester's open house at Behlen Observatory. At the foot of the stairs leading to the telescope is Professor Ed Schmidt. He's directing traffic to and from the tower, minimizing congestion on the observatory's narrow staircase. Outside the observatory, an undergraduate astronomy major, Kent Reinhard, is overseeing a smaller group of visitors who are waiting to look through an eight-inch portable telescope to view the planet Jupiter and its moons, ring nebula, and other sights in the star-filled sky.
Inside the building, in a room off the corridor where the line of visitors move past, Professor Kam Leung guides a romp through the galaxies via slide projector and lecture.
Leung is UNL's first astronomer. At least, he's the first astronomer in the University's modern era. He came to UNL in 1970 when the physics department decided to expand into the areas of astronomy and astrophysics
"When Behlen Observatory was constructed," Leung said, "it contained the biggest telescope east to Chicago, west to California and south to Texas. Now, Wyoming has one that's larger, but we still have a facility which ranks among the best in the country."
It was Leung who sought funding and directed the installation of the telescope at the Mead Field Laboratory site in 1972. The facility was made possible primarily through a $300,000 donation to the University by Waiter Behlen, president of Behlen Manufacturing Co., Columbus. Today, Leung said, it would cost $800,000 to $1 million to duplicate the instrument, according to the manufacturer.
The two-story, concrete-block building which is the support structure for the observatory was once a clothes changing house for workers in the bomb plants which were located on the Field Laboratory site during World War 11. It may not be stylish, but Leung, who selected the building, said "the choice was between putting the money into the telescope or dividing the available funds between the telescope and its support facilities. We chose to put the money into the telescope and locate it on the least expensive but most adequate site available."
Leung said that the silo-like tower which houses the telescope contains a concrete pier which extends 10 feet below the earth and rises approximately 20 feet above ground. Without the pier, the telescope would be subject to vibrations which would blur and distort images observed through the telescope.
Keeping the observation tower unheated also tends to minimize distortion of the image, but it also makes viewing the heavens on a cold winter night a rather chilly pastime.
"It seems even colder up here than it is outside on a cold night," said Taylor, who has spent many evenings viewing the heavens through the telescope. "I think it's probably got something to do with all this cold metal in here."
Taylor and each of his fellow UNL astronomers are engaged in various research projects involving use of the Behlen Observatory. Taylor's field of interest is primarily our own solar system. Telescope instrumentation is also his forte. Besides having responsibility for maintenance on the huge telescope, Taylor is responsible for building two instruments which use photoelectric cells to measure the intensity of starlight in various colors which are recorded on magnetic disk for later analysis by computer.
Leung, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in recent years, has been studying what are known as close binary stars. Binary stars are stars so close to one another that they almost touch or are actually joined together as they rotate about one another in the heavens. High temperature binary stars, which are suns of far greater heat intensity than our own sun, were first discovered in 1977, and of the dozen or so known today, most were discovered by Leung and his colleagues at UNL.
Schmidt is working with "classical cephids," or stars whose pulsations cause fluctuations in their brightness and intensity over a period of days. His interest in such stars is shared by Professor Norman Simon, a theorist on the UNL astronomy staff. Because of their pulsations, the cepheids being studied by Schmidt and Simon are extremely useful in astronomy, according to Schmidt.
The pulsations of such stars, he said, are related to their particular properties. And pulsating stars, because the periods of their pulsations are related to their brightness, can be used to calculate the distance to remote galaxies. The pulsating stars research at Behlen Observatory is supported by two grants from NSF, one to Simon and the other assigned to Simon and Schmidt.
Visitors awaiting their turn at the lens view astronomy exhibits.
Much of the research being conducted by UNL astronomers and astrophysicists is supported by federal grants. At the present time, federal funds are also being sought to add an instrument called a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) to the Behlen telescope. The device will in effect make the instrument as powerful as a 200-inch telescope. The CCD will make it possible to observe stars which are presently too faint for observation with the Behlen telescope. It will also permit tracking and observation of celestial bodies from remote television screens located in the support facility.
The prime motivation of each UNL astronomer is a natural curiosity about the world and the universe. They seek answers to such questions as: How did planets, stars and galaxies form and evolve? And what is the fate of the universe?
Visitors to the Behlen Observation can speculate on such questions also, as they survey the star-filled skies during open house, or they can simply accept the wonder of it all at face value.
M13 is still playing in the observation tower. Some time earlier, the telescope had been fixed on a spectacle in our own solar system. The planet Jupiter, half a billion miles away and enlarged to about the size of a dime, was visible, its disk crossed by two dark belts. Two of its moons, lo and Gannymede, were aligned one above the other in their rotation around their mother planet.
A man peering through the eyepiece had words to describe the sight. He said them, and at once recognized their inadequacy.
"Wow, that's nice ... I guess that's an understatement."
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