UC Irvine Sets Sights on New Observatory

In what may be a boon for budding astronomers, UC Irvine on Tuesday announced plans to build the county’s largest astronomical observatory on parkland in Bommer Canyon.

The university will provide the equipment, a 24-inch reflecting telescope believed to be the largest in the county. The city of Irvine will provide the land, a bowl-shaped site in the coastal foothills that is uniquely shielded from all sides to reduce light pollution.

While small in size when compared to research telescopes at Palomar Observatory in San Diego and the Mt. Wilson Observatory in the Angeles National Forest, UCI’s planned telescope will be more powerful than most amateur or college equipment.

“It’s going to be a very important training facility for students, as well as give anyone in the community an opportunity to view the sky,” said Rognvald Garden, a professor of physics at UCI and an infrared astronomer. “At the same time, it will not be just an amateur observatory; it will actually be large enough to facilitate research.”

What will be especially valuable about the planned telescope is its capability to pick up infrared rays, light waves outside the visible spectrum of light, UCI officials said. That will permit researchers and students to view large areas of the sky without interference from earthbound light sources.

“I know of no other teaching facilities at any other university that will be working in the infrared,” Garden said.

It also means that neither UCI researchers nor students will have to share observation time at other, much larger facilities, which are generally booked years in advance.

“With a small telescope like this, we’ll have full-time use of it,” Garden said. “We won’t see faint objects, but we will have more observing time and be able to observe more of the sky, because you see, the larger the telescope the smaller the area of sky you can observe. . . . We will be able to make large-scale maps of the entire sky with the infrared (viewer), which would not be practical or feasible with a very large telescope.”

Cal State Fullerton has a portable, 14-inch telescope, and Rancho Santiago, Cypress and Fullerton colleges have telescopes in the 8- to 10-inch range, according to Robert M. Gill, a professor at Cal State Fullerton and former president of Orange County Astronomers, the nation’s largest group of amateur astronomers.

The astronomers group also has a 22-inch telescope permanently installed at its 20-acre property in Anza, a desert community in Riverside County chosen for its remoteness and dark skies. The group has yet to finalize plans with the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department for an observatory with a 12-inch telescope at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley.

Despite light pollution problems in Orange County, amateur astronomers responded favorably to news of UCI’s planned telescope.

“With a telescope that big, you’re going to get a fairly spectacular view, even here in the city,” Gill said. “You really don’t need a super dark sky to look at the moon and the planets.”

The planned observatory will be built on 11 acres of city land that was formerly a cattle branding facility for the old Irvine Ranch, said Deanna Manning, Irvine’s director of community services. The property, south of Bonita Canyon Drive and about 10 minutes southeast of the UCI campus, is reached by a private, gated road belonging to the Irvine Co. Manning said the city and the university will have to reach an agreement with the company over access to the parcel, which the city has designated permanently as open space.

“The value for the city is that we’ll have access for our youngsters in our nature center program, and the university has offered to use their interns, their staff and teachers to put on programs for them, and at no cost to the city,” Manning said.

UCI hopes to award a contract to one of a half-dozen manufacturers to build the telescope in the next few weeks at an estimated cost of $70,000, said James Kelley, advanced laboratory manager for UCI’s physics department.

The telescope and observatory will take about a year to build and install, Kelley said. The observatory dome will be about 16 feet in diameter, built on a vibration-free foundation, with additional concrete slabs outside where smaller telescopes from the university’s former campus observatory can be set up.

The total cost of the project is estimated at $100,000 and will come from the equipment budget for the university’s newest science laboratory building, he said.

For the growing astrophysics group at UCI, access to a good telescope is vital for instructors.

“When you’re teaching students about astronomy in a classroom and drawing diagrams on the blackboard, it sort of soaks in, but doesn’t have much impact,” Kelley said. “It’s amazing to watch how that turns around when they have a chance to actually look through a telescope. They see for themselves what you are talking about.”