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Published online 26 March 2008 | Nature 452, 399 (2008) | doi:10.1038/452399b
News in Brief
Faculty protest at sale of Canadian observatory
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Although it is 60 years ago, I vividly recall my first visit to DDO as a 7-year-old, soon after my first encounter with science, "One, two, three...infinity" by George Gamow. Within the year I was committed to science for life. Paul F. Hoffman U.S. National Academy of Sciences
I too was taken on a regular basis to the DDO in the early 50's where old codgers with homemade scopes would show me the moons of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. Now I am the old codger, but the wonder of the young, seeing these marvels for the first time, is still there. To sell off the property, contrary to the conditions of its donation, for more monster home developments seems, in my opinion, contrary to the purpose of a University.
The various groupings of people using DDO have in the past 12 months included observers whose home institutions are in Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, and Turkey. Just before Christmas, there was in addition a minor NASA-supported visit from a young researcher with home institution in the USA. Since 2001, DDO data has flowed directly to NASA (Kepler mission) and to a NASA-funded project(Gray's "NStars", Appalachian State Univ). In the same period, DDO data has also flowed to projects in which other data inputs come from NASA space-based observations. Some details regarding observers and observing programmes can be had from http://www.astro.utoronto.ca/DDO/operations/schedulearchive/schedule-list.html by following links to the archived monthly schedules. DDO is currently a centre for contact binaries, as can be seen by examining the series of papers from Rucinski et al in AJ. That series now comprises 12 papers. A thirteenth is in advanced stages of preparation. A fourteenth is anticipated some months from now. The "two members of faculty" referred to in the_Nature_ writeup on which I am herewith commenting are surely Bolton (appointed in 1970) and Rucinski (appointed in his current capacity in 1999). The contact-binaries work also currently involves CSA-funded UofT postdoc Pribulla (whose current appointment is from 2007). The NStars project, running from around 2001 to around 2004, involved faculty member (now Emeritus) Garrison. As I know from helping to operate the equipment, the DDO 1.88 m can straightforwardly reach mag 13, even given the local light pollution. I gather from local lore that mag 15 is achievable with some effort. A little surprisingly, specialized extragalactic work, on AGNs, has been done in recent years, by a team under de Robertis (York University, Toronto). Details on instrumental capabilities can be had from http://www.astro.utoronto.ca/DDO/instruments/instruments.html. Google searching along the normal lines reveals some details of the current conservation efforts. One can, alternatively, get a sense of the evolving story by following links from http://www.rhnaturalists.ca.