Escape to Mount Hopkins

1/18: Tuesday morning, after breakfast, we all headed out of town to visit the famous MMT & the Smithsonian-operated Fred Whipple Observatory near Mt. Hopkins just south of Tucson. On the way there, we noticed something very unique about the highway we were driving on (I-19), which was the fact that the highway's distance markers & signs showed the distances in metric increments (meters,kilometers) , instead of US customary measurements (miles), due to the fact that the highway eventually goes through the US/Mexico border, and so to prevent a sudden chance in increments, the entire highway was set to the metric system.

After traveling many kilometers down I-19, we finally arrived at the Observatory's visitors center at the base of Mount Hopkins. Immediately after arriving, we noticed two large mirror arrays that turned out to be special telescopes that are used for detecting gamma rays throughout space. Shortly after exploring the visitors center, we all went up the long winding mountain road to the other observatories on the mountain. During the drive, we saw a deer passing near the side of the road, which we all managed to get a picture of before it ran off. Moments later, we finally arrived at the MMT, apparently, the telescope was originally known as the Multiple Mirror Telescope from 1979-1999, during which it featured 6 1.8m mirrors that would create a single clear image. However, in 2000, the telescope was changed to feature a single 6.5 meter mirror (and renaming it the Magnum Mirror Telescope) , while the six 1.8 mirrors lie in storage, unused for the past 11 years. During our tour of the MMT, we learned about how the entire building can rotate up to 270 degrees to the left or right, how the doors were extended & widened to accommodate the space needed for the MMT, and all of the work and effort that went into the telescope's conversion to an incredibly powerful astronomical tool.

We toured the smaller observatories just below the MMT, which seemed to be similar to the 61" telescope that we used on Mt. Bigelow, so we were pretty familiar with the telescopes there. When the tours were over, we all headed back to the visitor's center, where we watched a few videos about the research that has been done at Mt. Hopkins, especially the efforts to map the visible universe, and another video that showed how the 6.5m mirror was made @ the U of AZ mirror lab and carefully shipped and installed to the observatory.