Past and Present at the University of Calgary

The University of Calgary itself celebrated its own 25th anniversary not too long ago, as did the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory (RAO). See http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~milone/RAO25/index.html for details of the celebration and history. The current state of the RAO, and especially the status of the Alexander R. Cross Telescope (ARCT) 1.8-m alt-alt mounted telescope can also be found at: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~milone/rao.html .

The group and the Astrophysics Programme at the U of C. was founded by S. Ranga Sreenivasan and Doraswamy Venkatesan; by 1972, Alan Clark and Gene Milone had joined them. Since then Chris Pritchet (now at the Univ. of Victoria), Sun Kwok, Denis Leahy, and Russ Taylor joined the group, and which has expanded to include the large group listed in the rao.html website.

The RAO began as a twinkle in the eye of Sandy R. Cross, a local rancher from a Calgary pioneering family. His generosity began with an initial gift of a quarter section of land, continued with two block grants to permit the construction of a building to house a 1.5-m telescope in 1981, and, finally, funding of a new generation honeycomb 1.8-m mirror to replace the orginal 1.5-m metal mirror. The summer of 1996 saw the completion of the 1.8-m replacement and the restoration of all instrumental facilities formerly in use on the 1.5-m telescope. NSERC of Canada provided the funding for the 1.8-m mounting, and for infrastructure grants to assist development and instrumentation; technical salary support to maintain the facility.

The RAO was formally opened by Margaret Burbidge in 1972, and the IRT (now named the A.R. Cross Telescope) was dedicated by George Coyne and Harlan Smith in 1987. RAO facilities continue to improve and are increasingly easy to use.

The ARCT currently has three working instruments on the ports of its Cass bonette: the RADS automated photometry system, a Photometrics CCD camera in a field rotator assembly, and an infrared photometer equipped for InSb and bolometer work. This dewar also contains a set of filters manufactured by Customs Scientific after the design of the improved IR passbands described in http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~milone/irwg97.html

Near the solstice, the bonette will be refurbished to provide 5 ports. This will enable the Richardson spectrograph and an IR array camera to be mounted simultaneously with the other instuments. The arrangement will make it possible to use several instruments in one night.

Another CCD camera is mounted at the Newtonian focus of the 41-cm telescope for Open Cluster imaging.

Anybody seeking time on either telescope is welcome to fill out and submit an observing form (faxed, TeX, and web-based formats are all available and acceptable). The Telescope Allocation Committee meets every two months and time is scheduled in sextuples throughout the year. The next deadline for external proposals is April 15.

See the rao.html website above for more detail, or the 6th RAO Report, found in BAAS, 31, 508-514, 1999.

Other news from the astronomy community at the University of Calgary includes the following:

Gene Milone and Don VandenBerg (Univ. of Victoria) are on a team led by P.I. Ron Gilliland (StScI) to search for planets in the 47 Tuc globular cluster. Preliminary assessment is that 40,000 stars will be imaged with enough precision to detect transits by Saturn-sized objects in the 120 HST orbits (more than 8 days!) that have been allocated for this program, which is expected to produce a boon in variable star data, whether or not any planets are detected.
Gene is completing work on the sometime-eclisping system SS Lac (with Steve Schiller and Ulisse Munari of Asiago) and (with Bill Wilson at Calgary) on the short-period Cepheid SU Cas, a work that is dedicated to Adriaan Wesselink, his supervisor at Yale. With Josef Kallrath, he co-authored 'Light Curve Modeling of Eclipsing Binary Stars' published this month by Springer-Verlag. A new iterated, damped-least squared variety of the Univ. of Calgary version of the Wilson-Devinney code has been completed and tested. A description is available in Kallrath et al., ApJ, 508, 308-313, 1998. He is currently modeling the system M71-V4 with RV data from Mateo and Lin.
Denis Leahy is carrying out supernova remnant studies using X-ray imaging data and spectral data of the hot shocked gas and using radio observations of synchrotron radiation. Analysis of x-ray and radio data gives information on the physics of the explosion, of shock acceleration of relativistic particles, and also of the effects on the interstellar medium. Current projects include: Analysis of ROSAT x-ray observations of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant. DRAO 408 and 1420 MHz continuum and 1420 MHz HI line maps of the Cygnus Loop, IC443, and of supernova remnants in the Galactic Plane Survey. Analysis of Kitt Peak Schmidt telescope observations of supernova remnants. Denis is also actively studying X-ray binary systems. These consist of a normal type star in orbit with a neutron star, which is an intense source of X-rays, powered by the gravitational energy released by infalling matter. His current projects include: XTE observations of the x-ray binaries HerX-1, LMC X-4 and LSI+61 303: analysis of spectra, pulse shapes, and orbital/long-cycle phase dependence. Observations of Her X-1 by the EUVE satellite. Monte Carlo calculations of X-ray radiation transfer through matter near a neutron star.Calculations of pulse shape reprocessing in circumstellar matter, including propagation delays. Theoretical model of pulse shape formation in X-ray binary pulsars. Theoretical calculation of second order transition rates in strong magnetic fields.
Russ Taylor has been involved in the Galactic Plane Survey, carried out at DRAO.
Sun Kwok continues involvement with Odin and other space astronomy projects.

-- Gene Milone

York University

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