Stanford Student Observatory Turns 50

In the hills west of the campus, tucked in between the Stanford Golf Course Club and Center For Advanced Study In Behavioral Sciences, lies the Stanford Student Observatory, an optical astronomical telescope built by students for teaching students.

It has served for more than half a century in teaching generations of undergraduate and graduate students interested in astronomical observations.

In the 1970’s, Stanford started several new programs (SWOPSI, SCIRE and others) wherein innovative students could design courses and complete them for credit. The Student Observatory was the outcome for one of these programs. Dr. Nicholas Suntzeff (1974 BS in Math, with Ph.D from UC Santa Cruz, 1980), one of the originators of the project, recalls its first few years of history.

In the Fall of 1970, Professor Walter Meyerhof, chairman of the Physics Department was having dinner at the Arroyo dining hall with two of his freshmen advisees: Michael Kast (’74 BS, ’76 MS ME) and Suntzeff. In answer to Mike’s question about why Stanford had no astronomy program or campus observatory, Dr. Meyerhof said, “Well, why don’t you build an observatory?” Our reaction was, “What, us? We are freshmen." Dr. Meyerhof said he would oversee the financing and work with the university administration. We made a campus-wide announcement for a meeting on 25 February 1971 to gather as many volunteers as possible. In two and a half years, it was finished with an official dedication on 9 October 1973 by the Stanford Board of Trustees. It was built solely by volunteers from across the campus community: undergrads, grad students, postdocs, staff, and faculty. We had workers such as Nobel Laureate Robert Hofstader, the yet-to-be Laureate Ted Hänsch, Sally Ride, and others helping with wiring, painting, hammering, and lots of advice.

The design of the building was drafted by Ken Kornberg (’72 AB Architecture ’72 MS Engineering), and the construction manager was Gregory Howell (’65 BS and ’73 MS Civil Engineering). Kast and Suntzeff acted as the informal general managers. Funds for the observatory came from the Physics Department, the University Fellows, the Provost, the NSF, and the Bechtel Engineering Company. Parts for the observatory were donated (or “liberated” in some cases, as we would say in 1972) from various departments around campus. North American Rockwell donated the telescope mount, and the 100-year-old telescope dome was rescued from scrap when the UC Berkeley Leuschner Observatory was remodeled.

It would be difficult to build an observatory today with only amateur help. Greg Howell taught many of us the skills to help in the building. His motto was, “Teach them what to do, and only step in when they are about to hurt themselves.” Yet it was built in less than three years with no one hurt. The Observatory stands as a reminder of the spirit of initiative and community that makes Stanford University the great university it is.

Classes for credit at the Observatory began in the autumn term of 1973, taught at first by Kast and Suntzeff through the Student Center for Innovation in Research and Education (SCIRE)

Because of the leadership of Professor Meyerhof, initially the observatory was part of the Physics Department. However, because all astrophysics faculty at the time were in the Applied Physics Department and formed the core group of the newly established Astronomy Program, the administration of the Student Observatory was transferred to the Astronomy Program, initially chaired by late Professor Walker and by Professor Petrosian since late 1980’s. After 1995, when all Astrophysics activity in Applied Physics was moved to the Physics Department, the Astronomy Program, along with the Student Observatory, became part of the Physics Department. Since then, the main activity of the observatory has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, Physics 50 and 100, and Physics 301, with occasional small research projects and evening public events.

Over the years the observatory has undergone several renovation and additions but the original structure is still the one designed and built by the founders. An important renovation was carried out in the 1990s under the leadership of Professor Roger Romani who was the instructor of the above courses then. Here are his recollection of these events.

By the mid 1990s the observatory classes were still being taught by Prof. Art Walker with a venerable orange tube C14 and a long refractor on the old Boller & Chivens (B&C) mount, using hypered film that students developed in the dark rooms. Alas the mount gears were shot and accurate guiding was all but impossible. With help from students we acquired some SBIG CCD cameras for student projects, but even with autoguiding not much could be done. It was decided to attempt to upgrade the mount and get a more capable scope. The Astronomy program and Physics Department agreed to support this effort, but funds were limited, so we ended up getting the hardware done by two smaller companies and putting it all together with local sweat equity. AB Engineering of Ft Wayne Indiana was selected to recondition the B&C mount with all new gearing and computer control, including all required encoding, GPS, dome slaving etc. The telescope tube assembly was a 0.6m (24") f/10 Cassegrain from Torus Precision Optics. Teaching was stopped in 1997 to do this upgrade and we had the system working by late 1998. Rick Pam was a big help in putting all this together, especially hiring the crane to get the mount in and out of the dome! Several Physics and AP students were substantial contributors.

Many nights of alignment and testing extending into 1999 went into getting the full system working. We then obtained more capable thinned CCDs, replaced the ancient dome with a modern one, and got together a multi resolution spectrograph (designed by Keith Thompson) to supplement imaging and slitless spectroscopy projects. The telescope and mount worked well, with care, and were certainly good value for money (we suspect that both vendors lost on the project). These served all courses for a number of years with many good student projects completed, and also provided data used in several published papers, including some of the first astronomical use of Transition Edge Sensors (TES) detectors, with Prof. Blas Cabrera and students. However, given their 'homegrown' nature the telescopes were less robust than needed for 20+ years of students, and failures and down time increased.

In addition to above renovations, a Meade 16 telescope, kindly donated by David Siminoff, was housed in a nearby fiberglass dome and helped greatly with student access and bridging inevitable down time on the 0.6m. At this period, the Carnegie Institute developed the site near the observatory, turning this from a rural to suburban experience (with associated lighting issues).

Under the leadership of Profs. Bruce Macintosh and Steve Allen, a new 0.7m PlaneWave telescope and Ash Dome were installed at the observatory in the late summer of 2023, replacing the Siminoff telescope. Several improvements to the original observatory building were also carried out. The new telescope has an ALT-AZ mount, and each Nasmyth port has its own de-rotator. We are still working out the instrumentation, but currently have a CMOS imaging camera with filters on one port, and a grating spectrometer with a CCD on the other. Everything is computer-controlled, and switching between the two ports takes just a few seconds. In future we plan on testing the system with remote observing.

The 0.7m also has the option of visual observing with an eyepiece, with a periscope system to put the eyepiece level with a wheelchair-bound observer's eye. Combined with the ground-level observatory floor and the recent ADA-rated upgrades to the main building, we are now prepared for providing disabled students with the full astronomy observing experience.

The commissioning team for the 0.7m consisted again of students: Naveen Ravindar, Anthony Michael Flores, Jenny Tang Wan, Ben Dodge, Theo Schutt, and Brianna Cantrall, led by Observatory Manager Keith Thompson. Several of those students went on to be teaching assistants for Physics 100, taught by Prof. Steve Allen, in the Spring quarter of this year.

On October 30th a one-day celebration of the 50th anniversary will take place on campus and at the observatory with three of original builders, Kast, Kornberg, and Suntzeff present.

-- Vahe Petrosian, with contributions from Nicholas Suntzeff, Roger Romani, Keith Thompson & Steve Allen