It's the Real Thing!
Local Students Support Galileo at Table Mountain

Serious students give serious help collecting data for the Galileo Project through the Physics Outreach Program (POP) at JPL's Table Mountain Observatory.

John Sepikas suffers from an incurable condition that occasionally keeps him awake all night long: he is an astronomer. Worse, he teaches astronomy, and that makes him contagious. John is heir to a long, unbroken tradition among star gazers stretching back to Galileo himself, who could not have known how his delight and wonder at the universe he had discovered with his crude telescope would spread through generations of astronomical descendents.

John is an assistant professor of astronomy at Pasadena City College (PCC), and lead faculty on the Physics Outreach Program (POP) at the JPL-operated Table Mountain Observatory, at some 7000-ft elevation in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, just west of Wrightwood and only 50 mi. or so from Pasadena.

The POP, now in its third year, is the brainchild of Don Young of JPL and the Observatory. This continuing program was designed to build a pipeline from elementary school to high school to college to graduate school and the Ph.D. It serves as a seamless transition to enable students to acquire education in space science and maintain and grow in that interest and knowledge over their years of schooling.

John selects the best and most highly motivated students from his astronomy class to participate in the program. They must have a heart for astronomy. Some students, like Carrie Mortensen of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, are in regular programs, while others like Lloyda King are classroom teachers (8th grade). Rose Harris (a student-teacher) and Guy Genevier (who developed the software to automate the classes' picture taking), are returning to school after toiling in the work world at other jobs.

The students do both independent study and group activities. The group uses both the 48-in. and the 24-in. telescopes, customizes the software for observations of Jupiter, collects data, and passes them on to Project Galileo through Kent Tobiska, of the Galileo Atmospheres Working Group.

Their work provides the contextual background to corroborate the high-resolution images acquired by the Hawaiian telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope that are viewing at the same time. Their data serves as a broad double check and backup. In the Callisto 9 encounter, Hawaii experienced bad weather conditions, so the Table Mountain data was the only ground-based data available. Also the Hubble is very busy and usually can provide time only during encounter so Table Mountain observations are important for the before-and-after-encounter information.

As John explains, "...JPL... provides the opportunity to a community college to be a part of the science team. It builds...self-esteem and gives our students a view of a professional world beyond their everyday surroundings- serving as a motivator for serious study and action. The hands-on work with the telescope and the interaction with working scientists and engineers is invaluable to open their eyes to possibilities for their own career path."

Both telescopes are housed in their own domes, kept cool, in the low 50s, to minimize expansion and contraction of the hardware. While the 24-in. telescope is some 30-years old, the 48-in. instrument is much newer, converted from a Department of Defense satellite-tracking mission. Light from both is collected, not by eye, but by a CCD (charge-coupled device) cooled to -150 °F (-100 °C) to avoid distortion. The digital image then passes electronically to the computers in the observation room.

Galileo Galilei would scarcely have recognized the observing session. In his time, observing the sky was an outdoor task, often in very raw weather (the Galilean satellites were discovered in winter). Galileo's friends and students would have huddled outside, in the dark, taking turns squinting into the eyepiece of his 1-1/4-in. telescope. Table Mountain's star-gazers sit around wide computer consoles in the comfort of a heated room.

But the night, the stars, and the unbridled enthusiasm of the students would have been instantly familiar to the old master. Galileo's optical magic, which found tiny, wandering points of light and made them worlds, electrified his friends and students who, in their turn, passed the excitement along. With the help of the Galileo Project and the POP at Table Mountain, John Sipikis, even now, is passing the magic on.

--Jean Aichele
and Larry Palkovic

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