A Visit to Kitt Peak

A Visit to Kitt Peak

Introduction Hi, I'm Sherry, and I'm an amateur astronomer, which means that just for fun I like to learn about faraway stars and planets and other mysterious things in space. I recently toured Kitt Peak National Observatory. It sits high atop a 6, 875-foot tall mountain outside of Tucson, Arizona. The land the observatory is built on belongs to a Native American tribe. I heard the tribe wasn't going to let astronomers build on its sacred mountain, but the tribe changed its mind after looking through a telescope! They started saying the astronomers had “ long eyes, " since they could see so far with their telescopes. That made me laugh. I pictured people looking up at the stars with eyes longer than their arms! But it made a lot of sense because a telescope does make it seem as though your eye can reach the stars.

The mountaintop is perfect for stargazing. Away from city lights, it stays pitch dark at night. Being on a mountain keeps the telescopes above the dusty dirt that the wind churns up in the valley below. Besides, being up high gets you even closer to the planets and stars. Before going inside the telescopes, we stood at the edge of the mountain to look out at the small city of Tucson in the distance. I could see the base of the mountain near where I live. Though it was a hot and dusty summer day in Tucson, we had to wear jackets on the cool, windy mountaintop. I was glad to have a break from Tucson's heat! Kitt Peak has a collection of 26 humongous telescopes! These aren't telescopes you can hold in your hand. All these telescopes need an entire building to hold them up and protect them.

The tour at Kitt Peak let me get close to three of them. One is a solar telescope that astronomers use during the day for studying the Sun. The other two are star telescopes they use at night for studying stars and planets and other mysterious things in space. Solar Telescope I had never heard of a solar telescope before going to Kitt Peak. Since the Sun is a star, I had always thought that astronomers studied it with the same telescopes they used for other stars. But I learned that because the Sun is so bright, scientists need different equipment to look at it. Kitt Peak has the largest solar telescope in the world! Standing next to it I felt like an ant. It is as tall as a ten-story building. On the top of the telescope it looks as if there is a picket fence, which is actually a windbreak to keep one of the telescope's mirrors from shaking. Then there is this large ramp that looks like a slide coming off one side. The slidelike ramp actually continues at the same angle four stories below the ground. This thing is huge!

From the inside, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope looks like a roller coaster track. It has 200 feet of track aboveground and 300 feet below. It needs that much space to keep the Sun's reflected light from burning up the equipment.

The solar telescope has three mirrors that do most of the work by reflecting the Sun's light. The mirrors are on a trolley so astronomers can move them along a track. I learned that the trolley moves the mirrors really slowly--four feet per minute. That would make it a really boring roller coaster. I could run up and down the distance of the track at least twice before the mirrors move four feet.