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First off is an aerial picture of campus I
managed to get while leaving Tucson. You can see the main part of
campus (the orange/red brick buildings) as well as the football and
basketball stadia.
This is the original Steward Observatory,
which is now connected to the main astronomy building (and its plethora of
additions) and houses not only a telescope but grad student offices and the
occasional undergrad wondering why lab is cancelled when it's cloudy.
The 21" telescope inside the Steward dome.
The oldest building on campus (creatively
titled Old Main). The person who built it put it in this spot because
he wanted the students as far away from his own bar as possible.
The view of the campus mall from
the top of the steps of the Old Main building. Now anyone who doesn't
like a campus that looks like this is crazy. Who wouldn't like palm
trees, cacti, and the view of a mountain off in the distance?
New student union. The architecture is
designed after the USS Arizona (which is now a memorial at Pearl
Harbor). The bell housed in the gap just below the clock is the original bell
from the Arizona.
Administration building. sometimes called the Tower of Babel.
Cacti! Palm trees! Yucca!
... Saguaro are the coolest plants ever, man.
We toured the mirror lab, which is located
underneath the football stadium. This is a completed 8.4-meter
mirror. To make a long story short, they melt glass into a ceramic mold and
spin it in order to get the parabolic shape needed for telescope mirrors.
It takes days to
heat it up and then another 12 weeks to cool the glass to room temperature
without cracking it. Then they polish it with this cool mechanical
polisher thingy. (Great scientific terminology, eh?)
The planetarium with the Catalina Mountains in the background.
Kitt Peak!!! Woooooo!!!! The
white blob second from the left is the solar observatory. the
large telesope on the right is the Mayall 4-meter. Ooh, didn't notice the
radio telescope clear to the right.... That's probably the VLBA (Very
Long Baseline Array) 'scope....
Closer picture of some of the telescopes.
And I'll end with a lovely sunset from Kitt Peak.
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