Enhancing and Enlarging the Scientific Impact of the SARA Observatories

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Relatively few small colleges in the United States can provide regular access to research grade telescopes for faculty members to conduct research and for their students to gain training with telescope operations and conduct their first scientific research projects. A number of schools in the southeast U.S., however, pooled their resources and have taken over the operation of two telescopes. The Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA) operates a telescope on Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and another one on Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The National Optical Astronomy Observatories turned over the northern hemisphere telescope to SARA and operations there began in 1993. More recently, the consortium was able to acquire the southern hemisphere telescope that is scheduled to become operational in summer 2009. In order to do productive research, however, the telescopes require instruments: modern cameras to take high quality pictures of celestial objects and spectrographs to analyze the light from stars. Dr. Richard Igance from East Tennessee State University is coordinating an effort to replace the outmoded and unreliable instruments on the older telescope and to outfit the newer telescope with matching instrumentation at the same time. The funds for this come from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program. The newly instrumented telescopes will be used by SARA faculty members to conduct astronomical research and to train their students to use the telescopes and conduct research projects.