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28 August 2012: The September 2012 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. On the Cover May's Solar Eclipse and June's Venus Transit silhouette the telescopes on Kitt Peak.

18 July 2012: The National Science Board has approved the LSST project, allowing the NSF Director to put the top ranked ground based initiative of the 2010 Decadal Survey in a future budget. See the NSF press release 12-137. NOAO is a founding member of the LSST collaboration working on the site, enclosure, and telescope that will be located at Cerro Pachón in Chile (shown above).

26 June 2012: This image was obtained with the wide-field view of the Mosaic II camera on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory on January 12th and February 7th, 2012. An array of dark Bok globules, known as Thackeray’s Globules, can be seen in silhouette against the emission nebula IC 2944 in the constellation Centaurus. The image was generated with observations in the B (blue), I (orange) and Hydrogen-Alpha (yellow) filters. In this image, north is up, and east is to the left. This is one of the last observations completed with the Mosaic II camera before it was decommissioned.

7 June 2012: Venus transit June 5 2012.

4 May 2012: Left: Some last-minute tests are carried out on the new DECam prime focus cage as it stands under the disassembled Blanco 4-m telescope the night before it is installed. Right: With the Blanco 4-m telescope locked in a vertical position and the old prime focus cage removed, the new DECam prime focus cage is winched up to the top end to be installed. On May 3, 2012 the new prime focus cage for DECam was installed. The assembly (or “Camera”) includes the cage, hexapod, cabling, optics, and (for now) dummy imager.

16 April 2012: Using NOAO facilities, astronomers from Lowell Observatory have acted as “stellar paparazzi”, managing to identify hundreds of rare yellow supergiants and their more long-lived descendants, the red supergiants, in two neighboring galaxies. These newly identified stellar populations provide an important constraint on the theoretical models which describe how these stars change from blue, to yellow and then to red. The behavior of the models in this phase can influence theoretical predictions, including what types of stars explode as supernova.

4 March 2012: The March 2012 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. This issue includes information pertaining to the 2012B Call for Proposals, which are due March 29th. On the Cover The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is a liquid nitrogen cooled, 520-megapixel digital camera that is housed inside a high-vacuum Dewar; here, it poses in front of the CTIO Blanco 4-m telescope on which it will be mounted.

9 February 2012: The image above is from the Ground-based System Roadmap Committee’s summary of the results from their November 2011 survey of the community’s use of the U.S. System of O/IR facilities. Shown are the US telescopes used by more than 3% of the approximate 1000 U.S. based survey respondents. The size of each ellipse represents the number of users, while the thickness of the lines between telescopes is proportional to the number of common users.

12 January 2012: On January 9 and 10, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Subra Suresh visited NSF optical astronomy facilities in Northern Chile. The NSF group included Dr. Ed Seidel (head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate) and Dr. Anne-Marie Schmoltner who is a program manager in the NSF International Science and Engineering Office.

6 January 2012: Greg Derylo (Fermilab) confirms that the 72-CCD focal plane of the Dark Energy Camera suffered no mechanical trauma during its recent journey from Chicago to Tololo.

29 September 2011: Left: This close-up image of the nearby galaxy M101 was obtained with the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. SN2011fe, the closest Type 1a supernova to be observed since 1972, is visible as the bright, bluish star in the lower, right portion of the image (mouse over the image to highlight). This image was obtained on September 18, 2011, about two weeks after supernova PTF11kly achieved its peak brightness. Right: WIYN/WHIRC light curve, showing relative magnitudes in the J, H and Ks bands. Initial observation taken on August 26, 2011.

31 August 2011: The September 2011 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. This issue includes information pertaining to the 2012A Call for Proposals, which are due September 30th. On the Cover This image illustrates the dome floor of the Blanco 4-m telescope with components of the f/8 handling system in the early stages of its installation for use with DECam. Other completed work includes the DECam focal-plan, which now has all 74 science-grade CCDs installed.

19 July 2011: The Milky Way’s near neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has accreted a smattering of stars from its smaller neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). This image shows the LMC imaged by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Overlaid in red and blue, with the colors representing their line-of-sight velocities, are the stars whose origin has been traced to the SMC. These stars were discovered by a team led by NOAO astronomer Knut Olsen, through analysis of spectra obtained at the CTIO 4-m Blanco telescope.

2 June 2011: NGC3628, an edge-on spiral about 35 million light years distant, the Crescent nebula (NGC6888, a shell of gas excited by HD192163, a Wolf-Rayet star) and M82, a peculiar galaxy at a distance of about 12 million light years. These images were taken through B, V and hydrogen alpha filters at the WIYN 0.9m in April 2011 as part of a special Visitor Center AOP program. A few nights on the 0.9m unexpectedly became available, and Glen & Joan Saurdiff responded to this opportunity to acquire images with a research telescope using the S2KB camera. The image processing was done by Flynn Haase of the Visitor Center, telescope operation by Steve Peterson and Katy Garmany.

20 April 2011: The Kepler Cluster Study (PI: Søren Meibom, Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) is a program to search for planets around members of 4 open star clusters in the field of view of NASA’s Kepler mission, and to study the relationships between stellar rotation, age and mass. “Ground-based observations in young (~< 600 million years) open clusters, using NOAO facilities (WIYN 3.5m, the WIYN 0.9m, the CTIO Blanco 4m, and CTIO 1m), have suggested to us that a well-defined relationship exist between the rotation periods, ages, and colors of late-type stars”, says Meibom, “and that observations of such stars in older clusters can define a surface in the 3-dimensional space of rotation, color (mass), and age (figure 1, left). Now, using Kepler, Meibom and his colleagues have extended this surface to 1 billion years by measuring the relation between rotation and color for members of the open cluster NGC6811 (figure 2, right).

9 March 2011: It is with profound sadness and also deep sense of respect that I write this note to recognize the contributions of Victor to CTIO and, more broadly, to the generations of astronomers that have passed through CTIO, both as staff and as users of the facilities. I had the honor of overlapping with Victor briefly when I arrived at CTIO as a postdoc, but didn't get to know him well then. However, through interactions with the many people whose lives he touched, including astronomers, engineers, administrative and facilities staff, I've grown to understand the depth of his impact on CTIO and the “Tololino culture”. His leadership set CTIO on a solid course as a world-leading facility, both in its technical achievements and its culture of close teamwork and pride in the work that is done. That leadership was combined with a father-like quality for the staff, which firmly established the …

4 March 2011: The March 2001 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. About the cover image: Against a background of Eta Carina, taken with the SOAR Adaptive Module in Natural Guide Star mode (clockwise from top left): The SOAR telescope on Cerro Pachón, the SOAR Adaptive Module (SAM), the Spartan Infrared Camera, and the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph.

25 January 2011: Life is busy at the Blanco 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory right now. This is a bird’s eye view of the dome floor during the early stages of the installation of the f/8 handler for use with the Dark Energy Camera, DECam.

24 November 2010: Above: The full moon rises over Kitt Peak on October 23, 2010. Taken by Alfredo Zazueta just south of Little Tucson, Arizona. Below: The full moon, as imaged during commissioning by the new Mosaic 1.1 imager using the 4-m telescope on Kitt Peak.

28 October 2010: This composite image taken at Kitt Peak National Observatory outlines the Kepler satellite field of view, and within it, a circle marks the location of the faintest Kepler Mission host star yet, a G8 dwarf star harboring a 1.12 Jupiter-size exoplanet in a 3.9 day orbit. (reported by Howell et al in the Astrophysical Journal) Ground-based confirmation of this planet involved three different telescopes on Kitt Peak: the 2.1-meter, the 4-meter and the WIYN telescope. About the picture:The sky was photographed using a diffraction grating (Glaspey): spectra are visible on either side of the bright stars, the telescopes were imaged separately (Marenfeld) and later combined with the sky image.