In celebration of the Dark Skies Festival, happening this week throughout the Big Bend, we asked Stephen Odewahn, Resident Astronomer at the McDonald Observatory, to share his perspective on what the vast, dark skies of West Texas have meant to him over the course of his career in astronomy.
For as long as I can remember I've always been crazy about telescopes and looking at the sky.
As a kid at Tuscaloosa High School, I pestered the astronomers at the local University of Alabama so much that they eventually told me to just pick up the keys on Fridays and use their observatory as I liked over the weekend. That observatory had a 10-inch refracting telescope, and had great times with that telescope.
In the Spring of 1979, I wrote to every astronomy department I could think of asking for any kind of work. The director of McDonald Observatory, Harlan Smith, passed my pleading letter on to my future grad school advisor, Gerard de Vaucoueurs and I ended up spending a summer in Austin. I began learning how to classify galaxies and measure the brightness of exploding stars called supernovae. This was a wonderful time, but my core memory from early in that summer comes from observing on the 82-inch telescope at McDonald with Gerard and his wife, fellow astronomer Antoinette. Needless to say, this 82-inch telescope knocked the socks off of Alabama's 10-inch telescope.
On the first night GV, as Gerard was called, sent me down to the Astronomer's Lodge to eat my "night-lunch". As I walked down the hill on my way there I was disappointed to see clouds on the eastern horizon. A few steps later I realized that these were not clouds, this was the Milky Way rising just above the horizon! The superbly dark sky of West Texas was one of the biggest surprises of my young life.
For my dissertation work I studied some rather odd lopsided galaxies that Gerard was always fond of. These Magellanic galaxies, as they are known, show all sorts of bright star-forming areas, but they are scattered in a very asymmetric pattern compared to galaxies like our Milky Way. They were rather common in our nearby sky, but the origin of their lopsided appearance was not well understood.
Later, in the early 1990s, I left the de Vaucouleurs and began classifying galaxy images at the University of Minnesota using an artificial intelligence method called neural networks. Now we could classify galaxies that were so distant that, due to the expansion of the Universe, we were actually viewing galaxies in a much younger time of the Universe. Hence, these galaxies were much newer than the ones near us. How surprising it was to find my friends the lopsided galaxies all over the place in the Universe’s youth! Maybe this lopsided stage of development is something that happens in the early lives of galaxies?
These studies were complicated by the fact that when we view galaxies at great distances, the light from their stars is shifted progressively to the redder parts of the spectrum that we observe here on Earth. This effectively changes the color of the light we think we are using to observe a galaxy. Unfortunately, this change in color can dramatically alter the appearance of a galaxy. Our wonderful artificial intelligence methods, trained on nearby galaxies, will no longer classify the distant galaxy images correctly. What will we do?
To improve these exciting studies of young and distant galaxies it became clear that for training our neural network classifiers we need large samples of nearby galaxies imaged in the blue part of the spectrum. To do this we need clear, dark skies. Imagine how lucky I felt when I landed a job at McDonald Observatory. The dark skies here in West Texas are helping us to gather these ‘bluer’ images of galaxies and push forward our understanding of galaxy formation in the early Universe.
As I near my retirement from McDonald Observatory I am struck by the influence West Texas has had on my scientific career. My interest in those lopsided, irregular galaxies that seem to represent an important phase in galaxy formation was fostered during those long ago days on the 82-inch telescope. I have used many telescopes all around the world since then. Some of them were outside this world.
The science of today is very exciting, but lately, I find myself thinking more about the sheer beauty and wonder of our desert world. The night skies reveal myriads of brilliant stars, but the daytime hours reveal a panorama of mountains stretching out before us in all directions. The unique geology and plethora of plant and animal life here never cease to amaze me.
Observing the Universe, both near and far, from my mountain top in West Texas has been deeply enriching for me.
Endnotes
- Can't get enough Dark Skies? Check out this interview with Stephen Hummel, also of the McDonald Observatory, about why keeping our dark skies dark is so important.
- In this week's Nature Notes - honoring Patty Manning, a passionate advocate and educator who championed the Big Bend region's native plant life, and the new garden being built at the Alpine Public Library that will bear her name.
- Earlier this week, we shared the news of the passing of one of our most beloved and long-running Marfa Public Radio DJs, John Paul “J.P.” Schwartz, known for years on the West Texas airwaves by his DJ moniker “Doc Cactus.” On Monday, our volunteer DJs and friends of J.P.'s came together at the station to honor him. Click here to listen to this moving tribute to a dear friend.
- Ballroom Marfa's Space Sightings: Seven Sundays of Cosmic Cinema continues this weekend! Sunday, April 27th at 6pm at the Crowley Theater, Artist Jeanne Liotta returns to Marfa with an evening of film, moving image installations, and Path Of Totality - a live projector performance restaging the 2017 Solar Eclipse.
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