Flagstaff, Arizona

I recently visited my friend Dave who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. Dave works for Lowell Observatory. The Lowell Observatory is actually a collection of many telescopes. One of these telescopes was used to discovered Pluto back in 1930. I'm still kind of sad that astronomers no longer consider Pluto a planet, but I guess it makes sense. There are seven moons in our solar system that are bigger than Pluto.



Astronomers at Lowell Observatory study a lot of different things. They study planets and moons in our solar system, planets outside of our solar system, comets, galaxies, star formation, and near Earth asteroids, just to name a few.



My Friend Dave works at a place where they combine the light from several small telescopes to get better images of stars. These images help the Navy know exactly where stars are located so they can guide satellites in outer space. I was curious about how it worked. So Dave explained that the first thing we had to do was open the rooftops that protected the telescopes during the day so they could collect starlight. Watch the video to see.



Now that the rooftops are open we can collect starlight with these mirrors.



The starlight from several of these mirrors is collected underground by a very complicated series of lenses and mirrors.



Dave explains that the starlight is then collected by instruments that can combine all of the light from all of the telescopes to form a single image of a star.



This is the control room, where Dave uses several computers to point the telescopes to different stars and take images of them.



We worked all night and I learned many new things about astronomy. If you ever have any questions about astronomy, please let me know.