RICHMOND HILL-Drive past the 20-storey apartment buildings and numerous strip malls along busy Yonge Street, and past the creeping onslaught of residential housing, and you’ll find a huge piece of land, near the intersection of Bayview Avenue and Hillsview Drive. Flat, open, and mostly deforested it is surrounded by suburban roofs on every side.
For patrons visiting the largest optical telescope in Canada-who also rely on public transportation-a 10-minute walk from the intersection of Yonge Street and Weldrick Road is necessary to reach the main entrance of the 81-hectare plot of U of T land.
Walk past the entrance on an asphalt road surrounded by a wall of alpine trees, and a huge white dome appears. Of the three telescopes on this property, the 1.88-metre optical telescope inside of the dome bears the title as the largest in Canada.
“This is an obsolete telescope, that’s for sure,” said Dr. Slavek Rucinski, the associate director of the 70-year-old observatory, and one of the few astronomers on the premises, who started getting a taste for astronomy in high school as he looked at the stars through a pair of binoculars.
“You cannot do modern astrophysics with it.” he said.
The department of astronomy’s David Dunlap Observatory (DDO) and its administration building were built in 1935. The cost for both totalled more than $150,000 (about $2 million, in 2004 dollars), with financial backing provided by Jessie Dunlap, the widow of David Dunlap, who was a successful lawyer. She hoped to celebrate her late husband with an observatory in his name. The project launched after talks between the Dunlaps and U of T astronomer Dr. Clarence Chant, who also had a hand in establishing the Department of Astronomy at U of T.
As a testament to the times in which it was constructed, rivets dot the interior of the giant white dome-built like an ocean-going ship, as Rucinsky pointed out. Inside the dome, blue-coloured railings and catwalks encircle the telescope that is painted various shades of blue. Bearing little resemblance to amateur telescopes, this one is framed by a skeleton-like structure instead of a solid tube.
The dome lacks insulation, so the only safe haven from a nippy day or night is the “warm room,” where scientists spend most of the night poring over data from multiple computer terminals.
Outside, adjacent to the giant white dome are three smaller white domes that cap the top of the administration building, two of which house unused and smaller telescopes. The sight of the unusual white domes is what draws most visitors, according to Rucinski.
The closing of the McLaughlin Planetarium by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1995 has left fewer options for an astronomically curious public. And as the encroaching city bears down on the observatory, light pollution has come to be a growing problem for the telescope.
Although, with the naked eye, it may be difficult to see a sky full of stars in a large urban city, it is impossible for the observatory’s spectrometer to see past the washed out effect that city lights produce.
“This region [of the spectrum] is practically unusable,” said Rucinski, indicating a spike twice as high as the others on a plot from the spectrograph.
As a result, research at the observatory is being confined between areas of the spectrum that are impossible to observe-though there is still valuable information in the areas that can be, Rucinski noted. Poor weather conditions in Ontario have also caused more than half of scheduled observing nights to be put off.
“There is this problem that we can do whatever is possible, rather than having our research drive our decisions,” he said. But the development of a growing city is not the only problem facing the isolated observatory in a sea of two-storey homes.
There is the growing trend in observational astronomy for scientists to act as customers on the doorsteps of advanced and modern observatories with bigger telescopes and better climates, Rucinski explained. These observatories are now mostly run by technical staff and offer time shares for universities and scientists to purchase. U of T, for instance, has 33 guaranteed nights of use at the two 6.5-metre Magellan telescopes located in Chile.
Though his research in radio astronomy has never required the use of the two-metre optical telescope, professor emeritus Ernie Seaquist, the previous director of the DDO, has one reason to explain why he, twice a week, comes back-to be surrounded by suburban homes, and bustling Richmond Hill’s city centre, just minutes away.
“If you want to do a lot of thinking and writing, this is the ideal place to be,” said Seaquist.
“It’s quiet…just peaceful here.”
