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Session 12 - Cosmology, Large-Scale Structure and Distance Scales.
Display session, Monday, June 10
Great Hall,
Fairborn Observatory, the private, non-profit operating foundation that has built and operated robotic telescopes for more than ten years, is relocating its operations from Mt.\ Hopkins (SAO-Whipple Obs.) to a newly developed site at Washington Camp, Arizona. The site is at 5700 feet in the Patagonia Mountains, about five miles north of Mexico. It is surrounded on several sides by a national forest and is protected by a county lighting ordinance and an appreciation of dark skies by its neighbors. All observatory structures are being designed to blend into the Arizonan countryside, as though they were ranch buildings.
Tennessee State University will initially operate four automatic photometric telescopes there, will add a 24-inch automatic imaging telescope within about a year, and plans to locate a 2-m automatic spectroscopic telescope on the site within two years. Other clients of Fairborn Observatory are the University of Vienna, a four-college consortium (College of Charleston, The Citadel, Nevada Las Vegas, and Villanova), and Vanderbilt.
We will give details about the site, its development, and the new telescopes Tennessee State is developing.
