Wayne State University has added 40 acres of real estate in New Mexico to its list of assets. The land includes a 20 inch telescope and robotically controlled remote observatory. The Dan Zowada Memorial Observatory is a gift from former Michigan residents, Russ and Stephanie Carroll. The university plans to use the state of the art facility as part of it's physics and astronomy program. David Cinabro is the department chair. He tells WDET's Amy Miller the new observatory will be used in different ways.

We have three things. We plan to use it for teaching. I teach a class in astronomy techniques and uh, actually this winter I actually had some students do some observations of star clusters and they can use that to determine the colors and brightness of stars, which tells you, you can use that to figure out the age of the star cluster. Just as an example of a student exercise, we also plan to use it in research. One of my colleagues, professor Cackett studies compact systems that have discs surround them and light from those discs have a characteristic delay that depends on the color of the light and he was able to use the observatory to observe the sorts of delays and learn about basically measure the size of the system, then we like to use it. And this is what we really are still trying to explore as an outreach vehicle that is to raise people's level of interest in astronomy and such like that. 

There was some funding that was also provided for this. 

That's correct.

A part of the gift to Wayne State included that we would operate the observatory for 10 years. Um, and so we have committed to that, but he's also generously provided some funds for the operations. We have to pay taxes on the land. There's a power bill. It has an Internet connection. Um, you know, all of those things cost some money.

How much land was included with this?

So it's 40 acres, a high desert in south southwestern, New Mexico. And this is one of the darkest places in North America because of the remoteness of it. So not North America, but the U.S. You can go to places in Canada that are much darker. It's very dark, but basically it's a hundreds of miles really started right between Tucson and El Paso and there's really no large city anywhere close. 

Why should people pay attention to this area? What floats your boat when it comes to this?

Well, so besides it being a, you know, interesting, trying to discover wonders that you, what are the mechanisms of these wonders that we see in the sky? And some of us are curiosity driven. Uh, what, uh, you know, I, I research what is this mysterious force that's making the universe expand faster and faster and faster, called dark energy that doesn't have any effect on anyone's ordinary life, but sort of insane people like me lose sleep over over things like this. Why is, this is it's true mechanism. Um, but you know, the, when we're out trying to do cutting edge science that often has spin offs that are, that are useful, uh, astronomy. Astronomers developed a CCD cameras and I'm sure a, you have a CCD camera in your pocket. If you have a cell phone, you probably have a camera in your pocket. Um, and that's basically due to pioneering work done by astronomers in the late seventies. Making CCDS work as imaging devices. So what is the next step then, for this remote observatory.

And by the way, what's the name of it?

Oh, so it's called the Dan Zowada Memorial Observatory. The next step for it is the observatory shuts down over the summer months when it becomes a monsoon season in the southwest. Uh, so during the shutdown season, we're playing to take out the camera that's in there now. And the, uh, are called the filters to put in a better camera at the moment, pictures by the observatory. The fuzziness of the pictures are dominated by the camera itself. So we're trying to get a camera with smaller pixels so that, that won't be the limitation. And then we'd like to go from filters that are optimized, take pretty pictures to filters that are optimized to do science. Um, and so those upgrades should happen this summer. 

Davidson Dobro is physics and astronomy chair at Wayne State University. Spoke with WDET's Amy Miller.