Kitt Peak celebrates 60 years of telescope tourism
After more than six decades of staring off into space, Kitt Peak National Observatory still touts itself as a place with plenty to see.
The world's largest collection of major optical telescopes is celebrating 60 years of public tours at the site on the Tohono O'odham Nation, 55 miles southwest of Tucson.
The observatory opened in 1958 and officially started welcoming visitors in 1964. Since then, more than 2 million people have toured the site.
Kitt Peak is overseen by the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, better known as NOIRLab, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and headquartered on the University of Arizona campus, just north of Flandreau Science Center and Planetarium.
NOIRLab observed the anniversary of Kitt Peak tourism Friday with a mountaintop media event and special tour packages at 1964 prices.
The steeply discounted tours, which normally cost between $18 and $71 , sold out quickly.
"Kitt Peak Visitor Center has always sought to bring our visitors closer to the skies — literally and figuratively," said visitor center operations manager Peter McMahon in a statement. "Our telescope tours and observing programs offer the unique opportunity for members of the public to see and engage with the cutting-edge facilities that have put Kitt Peak on the map as a prominent center of astronomical discovery."
Friday's event also served as a grand reopening of sorts.
The peak was all but closed to the public for about three years — first by the COVID-19 pandemic, then by the almost-30,000-acre Contreras Fire in June of 2022 that destroyed three support buildings and damaged the highway leading up the mountain but spared the observatory's two dozen telescopes.
It took until Sept. 22, 2023, to fix the road and reopen the observatory to general visitation. Friday marked NOIRLab's first big media event at Kitt Peak since the closure.
Soon visitors will have a new reason to venture up the mountain.
Early next year, the first phase of Kitt Peak's new Windows on the Universe Center for Astronomy Outreach is slated to open inside one of the observatory's most distinctive structures, the McMath–Pierce solar telescope .
That 10-story-tall acute angle slanting down into the mountaintop first opened in 1962 and was decommissioned in 2017. Now a $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation is reviving the telescope's 8,000-square-foot interior as an interpretive center that, with additional funding, will eventually feature interactive exhibits, educational programs, a planetarium and unique opportunities to view the solar disk during the day and other bright celestial objects at night.
Start at the top
Tourism has been a part of the observatory from the beginning.
Tucson resident John Glaspey started at Kitt Peak as an intern in 1966. By then, "all of the basics of a really publicly accessible observatory were in place — a paved road, parking lots," he said. "It was in full swing, and it was marvelously popular."
Glaspey moved to Tucson to attend graduate school at the U of A, after studying optical astronomy at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
He said he reported for the first day of his internship with the observatory in June of 1966, only to discover that his boss was at a meeting out of town and hadn't left any instructions for him at the office on the U of A campus. His boss' assistant ended up inviting him to join her that night, as she took some observations using the largest telescope on the mountain at that time.
"So my first day here, I got in the car with her, and we went up to Kitt Peak," Glaspey recalled. "That was kind of off to a good start."
It was an exciting time to be working at Kitt Peak and studying astronomy in Tucson. He said he took a class in spectroscopy from famed astronomer Aden Meinel , who, a decade earlier, had helped select Kitt Peak as a national observatory site after scouting the summit on horseback. Meinel went on to serve as Kitt Peak's first director, before moving to the U of A to run Steward Observatory and launch the university's optical sciences program.
"So I got to walk right into this place when it was only a few years old, and I got to know all the staff astronomers and do all sorts of things that I hadn't expected to do," the 80-year-old said of his early years with the observatory. "I got to know how to operate all the telescopes, too, because my brain works that way. I like to understand how things operate, and as a result, I've been able to improve things sometimes and fix things when they're broken."
Glaspey earned his Ph.D. in 1971 with a dissertation on star clusters and stellar composition, then left Tucson to embark on a career in astronomy that took him to British Columbia, Quebec, Hawaii and Texas.
In 1998, he was offered a chance to return to Kitt Peak as the supervisor for scientific support on the mountain, and he jumped at it.
"Coming back to Kitt Peak was great. To me, that was almost like a dream to finally come back here and be part of the staff," he said.
Though Glaspey has been retired since 2010, he is proud to see his old observatory still plugging right along. He said Kitt Peak has managed to stay at the forefront of astronomical science by bringing in new partners, incorporating cutting-edge technologies and repurposing aging equipment for new missions.
"The old style stuff where there would be one astronomer at one telescope observing one thing at a time, that's long gone," Glaspey said. "Now you can do a lot more science better with, admittedly, even some of the older telescopes."
And there's no reason why the observatory can't keep going for decades to come, he said, though it will require continued innovation and proper support.
"If I were Elon Musk, maybe I'd contribute a few billion dollars. You could literally replace all the telescopes up there if you had enough money," Glaspey said.
New discoveries
Astronomer Arvind Gupta is part of the latest generation of researchers at Kitt Peak.
He joined NOIRLab in Tucson as a postdoctoral researcher about a year ago, so he could continue his research on exoplanets using an advanced spectrograph he helped build while he was a Ph.D. student at Penn State University.
The NEID spectrograph is mounted on the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope at Kitt Peak, where Gupta and the rest of his international team used it in 2021 to discover a new, Jupiter-like planet with an extremely eccentric orbit around a star about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
(Appropriately enough, the acronym NEID is based on the O'odham word meaning "to see.")
In July, Gupta was the lead author of a paper about the discovery published in the journal Nature.
He and his team believe they caught the planet, named TIC 241249530 b, in the midst of the transition into a "hot Jupiter," a term astronomers use for gas giants found orbiting very close to their host stars.
The planet's current path is a cucumber-shaped oval that brings it 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun, then swings it out to about the same distance as Earth. But over the next 100 million years or so, Gupta and company expect it to migrate farther inward to a much tighter and hotter orbit close to its star.
Their ongoing research is shedding light on how hot Jupiters turn up in places where gas giants should not otherwise exist.
Meanwhile, other telescopes at Kitt Peak are being used nightly to map the universe in 3D, uncover the mysteries of dark energy, capture the first-ever direct images of black holes and track near-Earth asteroids that could come crashing down on our planet.
It seems that even after 66 years – even with the advent of telescopes in space – the observatory outside of Tucson remains as vital as ever.
"Absolutely," Gupta said. "Every single paper I've ever published would not have been possible without the data we're getting down from Kitt Peak."
Contact reporter Henry Brean at . On Twitter:
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