Observatory Operations and Activities

Steward Observatory's Randall Swift (left) and Gary Rosenbaum (center reflection and right) prepare to wash the VATT's primary mirror prior to the start of the new observing season in September. (Photo by Christopher Corbally, S.J.)

The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT), part of the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO) in Arizona, has benefited substantially from the involvement over the last two years of Ned FRANZ at Steward Observatory. Many projects have come near to completion due to his efforts, including a new dome encoding system, primary mirror metrology, fixes to the secondary mounting, and new encoder mounts for the telescope. Also, Randy SWIFT of Steward Observatory/MGIO has continued to expand his involvement with the VATT and has taken over the majority of the site maintenance and operations, in addition to continued involvement with various observatory improvements, most notably the telescope hydraulics and dry air supply.

Improvements at the VATT continue, now under the leadership of scientist Matt NELSON, since Richard CROMWELL is now part-time on the project. The VATT/MGIO weather system now monitors site weather full time. Improvements to standard weather information, which help observer planning and observations, include the availability of a boundary-layer seeing estimation and a cloud sensor. After nearly a year of experience with the repaired secondary mount, it is becoming clear that image quality has improved by 0.2-0.4 arc seconds at the VATT, resulting in regular reports of sub-arcsecond seeing from observers. Finally, progress is being made on improving the pointing of the telescope though improvements both in the pointing model used and in the encoder mounts. This results in more consistent feedback to the mount motion control system.

The project to provide VATT with a medium-resolution optical spectrograph, last worked on in 1995, has been revived by CORBALLY, CROMWELL, HARMER (National Optical Astronomy Observatories), and NELSON. The optical barrels for the camera and collimator have been manufactured, and the optical testing of these lens assemblies is nearly completed. The spectrograph's mechanical specifications are under review.

CORBALLY continued to maintain the World Wide Web site of the Vatican Observatory and its Foundation. He added dedicated target windows for off-site links, and he implemented index frames for the Annual Reports, including that of 2000, to ease navigation through them. CORBALLY and KNOCHE (Vatican Observatory Foundation Development Director) worked with MacIVER (Sandline Productions) to allow accepting credit card contributions for calendars or making donations directly from the Foundation's web pages. The home page is at http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/

At Castel Gandolfo, a new Alpha Station 64-bit workstation running Unix has been installed, provided by the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. During the summer, BOYLE installed the astronomical image processing software package IRAF and the DS-9 Image Display System as well as other software needed for image processing. With ever-heightening levels of security at both the Vatican and the University of Arizona internet offices, the Secure Shell environment for the Specola's network of computers has also been installed.

Under the care of MAFFEO, the dome of the Zeiss visual telescope at Castel Gandolfo has been completely restored. This was accomplished through generous donations from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio della Banca di Roma, the Compagnia di S. Paolo di Torino, and SARAS, Raffinerie Sarde.

A new Hα filter for use with the telescopes at Castel Gandolfo has been generously donated to the Observatory by David Lunt and Geraldine Hogan of the Coronado Technology Group, Tucson, Arizona.

OMIZZOLO and BARBIERI (University of Padua) carried out a preliminary study of the feasibility of the digitization of the Vatican Observatory's archival astronomical plates. With the collaboration of CASANOVAS, they are at the same time creating a digital catalogue of the plate collection at Castel Gandolfo.

CASANOVAS, with the assistance of library volunteer FORNINO, is creating an electronic file of the Vatican Observatory's library holdings at Castel Gandolfo.