Neptune and beyond at the touch of a button
The Zeiss telescope at Auckland’s Stardome Observatory – once used to assist Nasa with the Moon landing – has reopened to the public after a major upgrade.
After five decades of operating as a ‘‘push to’’ telescope, the Zeiss has been computerised, meaning astronomers no longer have to manually move the equipment into position.
Stardome telescope operator Daley Panthagani said: ‘‘Before this, we had to manually move a half-tonne telescope to the correct co-ordinates to find an object in the sky. Now I can type in ‘Neptune’ or ‘Uranus’ and it will swing by and find it. This gives us much more time to actually look at objects in space, to research them, and explain them to our visitors.’’
Most of the machine’s early work, including helping Nasa with the Apollo Moon landing missions, was done this way. During the 1969 Moon landing, the Zeiss was part of a network of instruments around the world used to track the missions while Houston did not have radio contact with its astronauts.
‘‘Now the Zeiss is motorised, we can easily take visitors through five or six objects in the sky in a single session,,’’ Panthagani said.
‘‘I can use the Zeiss to show and tell the entire life-cycle of a star – from nurseries where new stars are born, star clusters where siblings grow together before they move away, middle-aged stars like our Sun with its varied planets, end-of-life stars like Betelgeuse, that’s ready to blow up and die, and, finally, remnants like ... the Ghost of Jupiter, a beautiful blue planetary nebula – in under an hour.’’
The farthest away he has seen through the Zeiss was the Sombrero galaxy, around 31 million light years away.
‘‘It was just a smudge but the fact it’s there – and that I can actually see it using this instrument – is just incredible,’’ he said.
‘‘To have this telescope accessible in the middle of a city is really special. Most people would have to go to a facility on top of a mountain or the middle of a forest to be able to do something like that.’’
The telescope is one of only about 25 of its kind in use around the world, and is the secondlargest publicly accessible telescope in New Zealand.
❚ This is a Public Interest Journalism funded role through NZ On Air.