I arrived at the Kitt Peak at about 1 PM on April 11, 2002 to participate in the Advanced Observers Program..   Though I was told I did not have to get there until 3:30, this turned out to be a good arrival time.  From the Visitor's Center I was able to get in on a 1:30 PM tour of the 4 meter Mayall telescope.  This is the largest telescope on the peak.  It is a good hike to the 4 meter, about 1/2 mile.  The altitude is 7000 feet and it is mostly uphill from the visitors center.   The building for the 4 meter scope, in the photo below,  is the large one on the right. It dominates the peak and can be seen from 25 miles away easily.  They have an elevator in the building, thankfully, that goes up 10 floors.
 

The view from the gallery just below the dome of the observatory is spectacular.  There are 24 scopes of various sorts on the peak almost all of which have prominant domes and can be seen from the Mayall observatory.  A few of these domed buildings are shown in the two views below.  The angular structure on the far left is the large solar telescope.   On another day, I got to see the inside of this unit.   The giant spray can shown above, and below to the right, belongs to the University of Arizona.  I cannot name all of  the rest of the structures off hand.  The telescopes are generally under the overall control of AURA, but are owned and operted by a variety of universities and national groups including NASA and NOAO.
 

After viewing and photographing the panorama, I went back to the visitors center arriving at 3:30 PM.   I was greeted by one of the attendants,  announced my reason for being on the peak and was immediately dubbed the day's AOP.  One of the attendants for the public programs greeted me and showed me to my dormetory room.   The room was modest, but very like a nice hotel room.  I was pointed to the dining hall where I was to have dinner.   Evening dinner is provided for all working astronomers and staff starting at 4:30 PM.   I had a very nice dinner and girded myself for the long day/night to follow.  While it was 90 degrees in Tucson in the morning, it was very comfortable on the peak when I got there at about noon.  Adam Block meet me at dinner and then showed me some of the sights on Kitt Peak, including a remotely controlled telescope, 2.1 meter size.  This scope was being readied, by an attendant, for the night's work carried out from Florida.  This telescope, and all of the telescopes I saw at the peak had remarkably large and solid looking mounts.  (G)

At 6 PM a night program for the public takes place.  This is a 4 hour program for about 16 to 20 people who get lessons in viewing the sky with charts and binoculars and then get a look through the Meade 16" at a variety of objects.   The 16" is in a building attached to the Visitor's Center.   I was able to join this group and found it a nice orientation to the site and a chance to get a preliminary impression of the seeing conditions.   Just after sunset it got quite cool and windy.  The temperature dropped by 20 degrees in the first hour after sunset.  The dome housing the 16" LX200, a generously sized Ash dome,  is shown below.  It is adjacent to the Visitor's Center.  A computer room in the center can be used to run the scope remotely while imaging.   To the right, below  is a photo of me at the eyepiece of the LX200.  The dome is spacious and will easily hold a dozen persons for group viewing.  The telescope can be controlled from the dome using the computer equipment in the dome.  The dome computer is linked to one in the Visitor's Center for remote control and imaging.  Photo in the second row below on the left is Adam Block at the computer in the Visitor's Center.   At the moment of the photo he is operating the 16" during our imaging session.   To the right is a photo of a model of the 4 meter Mayall telescope.  I could not get a direct photo of it since the operating floor area was closed to visitors.  We could see the instrument through a double pane of grimey plexiglass windows.  This was not a good view.

At 10 PM, the night visitors program was over and the Advanced Observing Program (AOP) started.  I then had the 16" to myself and of course the expert help of Adam Block to get it running for me.  Adam is a personable young man less that half my age, but with several times the imaging ability. (G)   It was a joy to work with him especially since he knows the vagaries of the equipment and particularly the 16" LX200 so well.   The original plan for the evening was to do some viewing, then some imaging and finally some more viewing.  As it turned out the seeing was only about 6/10.  I was sad about this, but at least it was not raining.
 

Because of the sky conditions, and not knowing if it would get better or worse, we decided to try for one object early in the session.  It was to me a rather obscure one at that, NGC 5248.  This is a distant face on galaxy.   It was just high enough by 11 PM to image.  We decided to do the color information first with the hope that the luminance frames could be gotten when the object was nearer the zenith.  We hoped that perhaps the skies would improve later.  (not to be)  Thus 8 exposures of 10 minutes each were started using 2X binning.  The camera was an SBIG ST8 with color wheel and AO unit.   The order was B, R, G, B,  and then another similar set was taken.   The seeing was on the order of 1.8 to 2.0 arc seconds.   This is not very good for Kitt Peak.  Values of 1.2 are common from this site.  In any case, the frames looked satisfactory but not great.

Then we did 10 luminance frames, but the seeing got worse and worse.  When it got to about 2.5 arc seconds we stopped imaging this galaxy (we came back to it later) and did some viewing of the many available objects.  To get some idea of what the viewing was like I can describe M51.  There was a clear bridge between the galaxies and arms could be seen on the large galaxy.  Several edge on galaxies showed clear dark lanes.  These views were about as good as I have ever seen through a 12" scope from my Wisconsin dark site.  Perhaps a bit better.   Thus, while only fair viewing by Kitt Peak standards, the viewing was quite gratifying to me.   The view was not quite as good as one very good night I had on the 40" scope at Yerkes.  I had a chance to view through it about 3 years ago.   In any case, the skies on Kitt Peak were quite variable on April 11.  By the early hours of April 12, we decided to try for a few more luminance frames of NGC 5248.   But of 5 frames, 2 were good and 3 unusable.  Seeing was holding to the 2.5 arc second range.  Also by this time the object was getting too low in the West to continue.

The 8 color frames and 8 of the best luminance frames were combined to get the result shown below.  This is a nice image, though not as great as I had hoped for.  But it a galaxy that is not too often imaged I think.   This was not the best possible imaging experience but was very satisfying never-the-less.  In the overall,  I was very pleased with the experience.  It was most interesting to see how well the SBIG equipment worked and how hard it was for even an expert to get and hold focus.  The 16" had terrible image shift and drift of the mirror.  Focus was obtained using a JMI focuser and evaluating the spread function of a star.  At  5 AM the session was over.  I went to my room and slept for about 6 hours.  Then I had lunch in the dinning room, which seems to have food ready at all hours.  The dinning room staff also provided a night lunch for me and all the coffee needed. (G)  I looked around the peak for a short time to get fully awakened and then was on my way back down the mountain heading toward  Tucson.
 

I was fortunate to come back to the peak three days later with a group of alumni from the University of Wisconsin.  We took a good long look at the WIYN telescope.  This is the Wisconsin, Illinois, Yale, NOAO telescope.   It is a 3.5 meter scope with a thin mirror that is servo controlled to hold its shape.  One photo below shows the mirror side and the other the servo controller side.  The mirror was made at the Arizona University Mirror lab which was also on our agenda.  (see photos at end)   We saw one 8 meter mirror being polished and another smaller mirror in the spinning oven.  There are two of the 8 meter mirrors being made for the BIG  binocular telescope going to Mt. Graham, in Arizona.
 

Below I show the flat target used for the WIYN telescope.  All of the flat setups I saw on Kitt Peak seem to be done with an in dome target like this one.  A photo of one of two equipment arrays on the WIYN is also shown.  On the WIYN these are at the Naysmith focus of the telescope.  On most others it is at the Cassegrain focus.  But, in all cases the instruments are a massive, even bewildering, array of intricate components.
 

We also had some time on a 1 meter scope where we grabbed a "snapshot" of M51.    The 1 meter scope is shown above with a close up of the business end to the right.   The camera is a 2000 by 2000 pixel chip, liquid Nitrogen cooled.   This was only a 5 minute exposure with no flat and no processing at all.  The image of M51 is a nice example of what the 1 meter light bucket can do in a short time with a professional CCD camera.  And with the good seeing at Kitt Peak.
 

The Mirror Laboratory at U of Arizona is a marvel in its own right. Below are two photos from the lab.  One is the polishing operation on one of the 8 meter mirrors being made for the big binocular telescope to go on Mt. Graham.  Glass workers are crawling around on the mirror, I assume to find flaws or regions that need local treatment.  The other photo is of the furnace in which another mirror is cooking.  I did not have a wide enough lens to get all of the furnace in one shot.  This furnace melts the glass into a honycomb mold and spins it to form a thin parabolic mirror.  This mirror only has to receive a final figuring and polishing since it comes out of the furnace with a basic parabolic shape because of the spinning effect.  This gigantic, rotating furnace is truly something to behold.
 

More to come.  :-)

Doc G