WIYN Observatory

Yale is a 17% partner in the WIYN consortium, which operates a modern 3.5-meter optical telescope located on Kitt Peak in Arizona. The WIYN telescope is one of the best imaging telescopes in the world. Its modern instrumentation includes a CCD camera with a 10 arcminute field of view (Mini-Mosaic or OPTIC), an infrared imager with tip-tilt correction (WHIRC), and a bench spectrograph which is fed by fibers from either a multi-object, fiber-positioning robot (Hydra) or an integral field unit for studies of extended objects (SparsePak). WIYN is now building a major new instrument, the One Degree Imager (ODI). ODI will utilize both WIYN's one degree field of view and excellent image qualtity. The focal plane of the optical imager will be sampled with 0.1" pixels, or 1 Gigapixels in total. The sharpness of images will be actively improved by correcting images for tip/tilt image motion during the integration. Corrections will be done over the entire field of view, using a novel detector technology called Orthogonal Transfer Array CCD, making ODI a unique and competitive instrument in the era of wide-field surveys. Much of Yale's time on the telescope is used for graduate dissertation projects. Over the past few years, the dissertations of 6 Yale graduate students have been based primarily on WIYN data. Among the PhD projects carried out are studies of the stellar populations of nearby dwarf galaxies and studies of the kinematics and stellar populations of environmentally disturbed cluster galaxies.

W.M. Keck Observatory

In 2008, Yale purchased 15 nights per year for 10 years on the Keck 10-meter telescopes from The California Institute of Technology.  There are also up to 5 nights per year available for collaborative projects between Caltech and Yale.  The twin Keck Telescopes are the world's largest optical and infrared telescopes and they stand on the summit of Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano.  Because of the large size of the 10-meter primary mirrors, and the application of a laser guide star adaptive optics system, which overcomes atmospheric distortion, the Keck telescopes offer the greatest potential sensitivity and clarity available in astronomy.  The Keck telescopes offer an impressive suite of instruments. There are a wide array of spectrographs, including DEIMOS, the most advanced optical spectrograph in the world, capable of gathering spectra from 130 galaxies or more in a single exposure, HIRES, NIRSPEC, OSIRIS and LRIS.  There are also two near infrared cameras and an interferometer which combines light from the two Keck telescopes to provide the effective resolution of a telescope 85 meters in diameter.  Yale researchers, including faculty, graduate students and postdocs, are already using this valuable resource to provide science with impact for the community-at-large. 

Quest and Quest 2

QUEST (the Quasar Equatorial Survey Team) is a collaboration between members of the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale , the Department of Astronomy at Indiana University, the Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomia (CIDA) and the Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) in Merida, Venezuela. This collaboration built and operates a 16 chip (8k x 8k) mosaic driftscan camera, which has been in operation since December 1997 on the 1 meter (clear aperture) Schmidt telescope of Llano del Halo Observatory in Venezuela. Using this telescope and camera, Yale astronomers, including graduate student Kathy Vivas and recent PhD Chris Sabbey, are conducting surveys for quasars, supernovae, accreting compact objects, RR Lyrae variables and pre-main sequence stars.

SMARTS

SMARTS (Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System) is a consortium that operates the small and medium telescopes at Cerro Tololo in Chile. There are four telescopes: 0.9m with a 2K CCD camera; 1.0m, with a 4K CCD camera; 1.3m with ANDICAM, a duel optical and infrared imager; and 1.5m with the RC Spectrograph and CPAPIR, an infrared imager. Yale, as one of the twelve consortium members, uses about 16% of the time on all telescopes. Current projects include looking for extra-solar planets using microlensing techniques, optical observations of transient X-ray sources, tracking the optical/IR afterglow of gamma-ray bursts, imaging of the immediate solar neighborhood, and spectroscopic observations of variable stars. Target-of-opportunity objects and synoptic observations, which are difficult to do at other observatories due to time constraints, are common with SMARTS. Several completed and ongoing PhD theses by Yale graduate students make extensive use of SMARTS data.

SMARTS Optical/IR Observations of LAT Monitored Blazars

This program uses ~700 hours per year of Yale's share of SMARTS to observe all public Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) monitored blazars that are accessible from Chile.  Data and results from the SMARTS telescopes are publicly accessible on this webpage: Fermi  

National Facilities

Members of the department are routinely awarded time on NASA space-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the X-ray telescopes CHANDRA, XTE, and ASCA, and the gamma-ray telescope GRO. There is significant synergy between these space-based missions and ground-based telescopes, and many students are carrying out dissertations combining Hubble and X-ray data with ground-based data obtained with Yale telescopes. Other projects utilize the facilities available at the national optical observatories (e.g. Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo) and radio facilities (e.g. the VLA and Green Bank).

Leitner Family Observatory

The Leitner Family Observatory is a facility of the Astronomy Department at Yale University. It was dedicated in May 2005 and made possible by the generous support of James Leitner ('75). The facility has two Ash domes which contain a 12" LX200 Meade telescope and a refurbished Grubb refractor that was originally purchased by the astronomy department to observe the 1882 transit of Venus. Additionally there is an observing deck with piers for four 8" telescopes. The primary use of the observatory is undergraduate research and education. The facilities are used for classes at Yale College, such as Astronomy 155 and 255. The observatory is also used for public outreach events, and it is open to the public on the first and third Tuesday of the month, weather permitting. The interior space of the main building is being developed as a lecture hall and museum. LFO is also frequently used by STARRY, the Yale undergraduate astronomy club, which meets at the observatory on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of the month.

The Yale Southern Observatory (YSO)

The principal telescope of the Cesco Observatory is a Double Astrograph consisting of two lenses each 20-inches in diameter, one designed for blue light and the other for yellow light. The lenses focus the light separately onto two photographic plates with dimensions of 17 x 17 inches. The photographic plates are purchased in the US, shipped to Argentina, where they are exposed in the telescope, developed and then shipped back to the US. In New Haven, Connecticut the plates are measured with a precision measuring machine and the analyses performed which allow us to determine the absolute angular motions, or proper motions, of the stars.

The Southern Proper Motion Program (SPM)

Ongoing program to measure proper motions in the southern hemisphere, using the double astrograph at YSO.