Blanton, the new director of Carnegie Observatories, describes his priorities for keeping the institution's telescopes competitive, focusing on the Magellan twin six and a half meter telescopes and the SDSS program at the DuPont telescope. He says a key challenge is maintaining aging infrastructure built in the 1990s while also pursuing new instrumentation that could observe fainter objects and wider areas of sky, and he stresses that building such instruments requires collaborative partnerships, citing Carnegie's work with SDSS as an example.
340 words · auto-generated from the episode video
20:36you're you're very new director here. >> Very new. >> What are you looking forward to in your tenure here? >> So there's um, you know, the the things that are going on here uh, the really the main observational event right now is is Magellan, two six and a half meter telescopes. Um, and uh, and the SDSS program at the DuPont. Uh, and what I think, you know, our challenge, one of our challenges, is, you know, with any, you know, any large telescope like this, really
21:18any telescope, you want to make sure that the things that are happening at it are continue to be cutting edge. So, I think one of the things we really have to to figure out is the strategy for for for keeping the telescope functioning. It was built in the '90s. It's got all of the, you know, it's got some '90s technology still in there. There are things like that which are which which really have to be done. They're sort of more on the technical, you know, uh, infrastructure side. Right. Uh, but then there's also there are new opportunities for instrumentation now. There is there's instrumentation that that you could build better now and be able to look at
22:01fainter things, look at things over, you know, wider swaths of sky. And I think that figu- you know, in the in the in that those sorts of time scales, I think we have to figure out how to build those instruments. And and one of the things about that is that uh, and I think this is borne out by some of the successful efforts, recent efforts, is that you really have to do this collaboratively. >> Right. >> Like, you know, Carnegie has to be working with, you know, and this this this is part of like the way Carnegie has worked with SDSS, which has brought a lot of new instrumentation and energy to certain parts of of
22:43Carnegie. Um, and I think this is true
AstronomyAstrophysicsOpen DataCosmology