Category Archives: General

david dunlap observatory, General

Astronomy’s Loss

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Is Apparently a Developer’s Gain in Toronto

The historic David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto, Ontario (Canada), has been sold to Metrus Development, Inc., which has already started drilling holes in the dome to affix huge padlocks to the doors and windows. It’s not clear what Metrus plans to do with the facility, but it’s likely the telescope (which I’ve been told is still working), is headed for the dustheaps of history, prematurely. Or, perhaps it’ll end up in a museum somewhere. The land is probably headed for development.

How did this happen? It seems that the University of Toronto decided that the observatory, which has been quite productive, was to be sold and the proceeds used to buy new equipment for the university’s department of astronomy. The last employees were let go in July and astronomer Tom Bolton (the first astronomer to discover a black hole) told to get his research materials out. It’s a sad end for a famous site. I first heard of it when I wrote to an astronomer there (Helen Sawyer Hogg) for permission to use an image of a star cluster that she had taken using DDO. It had a fascinating history and a wonderful telescope.

From what I could tell in my reading about DDO, the observatory was being used to do long-term surveys and, due to Bolton’s efforts, light pollution from nearby subdivisions had been mitigated quite a bit. Yet, the university claimed that the observatory couldn’t do “world-class” research due to light pollution.  I find that assertion a little bit hard to believe, given the advances in technology that many observatories around the world use to increase their sensitivity. Perhaps some of the University’s decision-makers could have talked to observatories in California and elsewhere that are doing good work despite far worse light pollution than what was threatening DDO.

But, perhaps somebody in the department had their eye on something new and shiny, and selling off DDO was the only way to get it. These things do happen, particularly in the name of “progress.” Still, it seems to me that a heritage site such as the David Dunlap Observatory, which educated generations of astronomers and made huge contributions to astronomy, deserved better treatment than it got. (You can read more about the DDO’s plight at SavetheDDO.)

General

Growing Up in a Science Microcosm

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University of Colorado against the Flatirons

I was born and spent my childhood and early adult life in Boulder, Colorado. For those who haven’t been there or don’t know about Boulder, it’s home to the University of Colorado and a whole slew of science research institutions including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Space Science Institute. Ball Aerospace makes its home in Boulder, along with other space-related outfits.

Both of my degrees are from CU, and as an undergraduate, I worked at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and hung out at the campus planetarium. In graduate school I worked for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and continued doing a few lectures at Fiske once in a while to keep my finger in the live planetarium show end of things.

It was interesting to grow up in Boulder’s science community, once I got old enough to appreciate it. There were always lectures on campus, covering just about any topic in science you can imagine. I remember going up to CU once to hear a fellow speak about the emergence of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, and it was the first time I ever heard of stromatolites. Another time a group of us went up there to see a physics lecturer and his amazing experiments. Astronomers, geologists, physicists, you name it, they were available to us, and as I grew up, I met some who were the parents of variousradiosond school classmates.

My dad often talked about the science these folks were doing. One time we found a radiosonde from a weather experiment. It had landed in our fields (we had a farm outside Boulder). He called around and found out it belonged to one of the research institutes (probably the predecessor to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Together we took it back to the lab and I remember looking around with awe at the place. Daddy also worked at Ball Aerospace briefly and used to bring home pictures of some of the spacecraft the company was working on.

Like most kids, I went through the whole “I wanna be an astronaut, I wanna be a pilot, I wanna be a … whatever…” thought process. Eventually I ended up deciding I wanted to be an astronaut and writer. Of course, I haven’t gotten to do the astronaut part, although I certainly have met plenty of them and understand what it is they do. My science writing is a direct result of growing up in a place where science research and education is an integral part of the community.

Being an astronaut or a scientist isn’t an idea outside of the realm of possibility in a place like Boulder–not then and certainly not now. It occurs to me that kids growing up in other places where science isn’t such a big part of community life might feel differently, as if science was being done “somewhere else” or was for “other” people.  I’m glad I grew up in Boulder; there are days that I miss it very much. Would I go back?  That’s a question we talk about once in a while.  I don’t know if I can go back “home” or not. But I’m sure as heck glad that I lived there in the first place.  There aren’t too many places where one small town holds so many research groups. Perhaps that’s why I think of it as the center of the cosmos, and I know that for those of us who grew up in Boulder with an interest in science, it definitely took a village to create that interest.