While Arizona wildfires rage several thousand miles away from Charlottesville, University star-gazers are feeling the heat.
The University is one of a number of other institutions nationally which own part of the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, part of the National Park in the Pinaleno Mountains in Arizona. The telescope and its home observatory are currently threatened by the wildfires -- caused naturally by lightning -- in the southwest region of the country.
The forest service is trying to control the blaze by using retardant dispensed from airplanes and helicopters. In addition, the observatory has sprinklers extending in a 100-yard radius to wet down the surrounding ground.
"Preventing fire has always been part of the observatory plan," Astronomy Prof. Dr. Robert Rood said.
The telescope, which the University owns two percent of, has been in planning and construction since the mid-1980s, Rood said.
By the time of its anticipated completion, sometime during 2006-2007, the telescope will be one of the best in the world.
"It will have the most collecting area of any single telescope in the world," Rood said. "It will also have the highest resolution -- or the ability to see detail -- of any single telescope. It will be a very powerful instrument."
Though the telescope is not intended for any specific study, it is likely to extend astronomers' viewing capabilities in a number of ways.
"It is a very general purpose telescope that will be used for lots and lots of things," Rood said. "It will be used for studying the distant universe. It will be particularly good for finding planets in other stellar systems and seeing fine details in star clusters."
Despite the contribution the telescope will make to the scientific world, its construction has not been without controversy. Since its conception, protest groups, specifically those associated with the Native American population in the area, have opposed the telescope.
"Apaches protested on the basis that the mountain is an Apache holy mountain," Rood said. "From the early '90s on, the most vocal opposition to the telescope has come from the Apaches and their allies."
The opposition may be partly responsible for the danger the telescope and observatory on Mount Graham now face.
In an effort to road-block the construction of the observatory, Apache groups pushed to have the top of the mountain where the telescope is located declared a red squirrel refuge, prohibiting the removal of timber there.
In the meantime, the forest on the top of the mountain has suffered an infestation of aphids and bark beetles, killing many of the trees and leaving dead timber to surround the observatory.
"The forest service is prevented from clearing the dead timber because of the red squirrel refuge," Rood said. "The fires are much worse because the forest service has not been able to manage the forest the way they would have been able to otherwise."
However, to the relief of astronomers and the research institutions involved with the telescope, flames have been subsiding in the last couple of days and it seems that the observatory on Mount Graham will escape damage.
"The sense I get from those managing the fire is that they're less worried about it now than they were two or three days ago," Rood said. "Some communications equipment on Heliograph Peak was destroyed, but the observatory links are still OK, so that's some potential damage we missed. If the fire goes like it looks like it is going and doesn't do any damage, having some of this dead timber burnt will leave less firewood close to the observatory."
The fire currently burning on Mount Graham is not the first to threaten the Large Binocular Telescope there; in 1996, wildfires presented a similar threat to the observatory. The wildfires in the vicinity of Mount Graham represent a larger national concern with forest management.
While the natural ecosystem of the forests are adapted to having wildfires pass through them every 10 to 15 years, forest management under the Department of Interior since the late 1800s has emphasized a hands-off, preventative approach, said Matt Nelson, a research scientist with the Astronomy Department who recently moved to Charlottesville from Safford, Ariz., at the base of Mount Graham.
"Forest fires have not been allowed to spread and there haven't been many," Nelson said. "Fuel loads on the forest floor are 10 to 20 times what they should be. The federal government is starting to realize that we have very unhealthy forests and that managing them is OK."
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