Sky and Telescope - August 2015 - 23

precise radial-velocity spectrometer, designed to observe
candidate exoplanets and conﬁrm their existence while
also obtaining their masses. NOAO will manage this
program for the agencies and so will remain a WIYN
partner. Its share of telescope time will still be open
to the community, but with priority given to proposals
devoted to this work.
In early 2015 NASA put out a call for proposals to
build this instrument. In the meantime WIYN remains
fully open and funded, available for exoplanet as well as
general research.

inquiries from a total of six parties, but none could be
ﬁnalized before 2015.
Thus, on July 31, 2014, the 2.1-meter was oﬃcially
shut down.
In March 2015, however, a university partnership
won the right to take over the telescope. The agreement
was not yet public when this article went to press, but if
all goes well, Allen hopes the telescope will reopen for
research sometime this year.
Then there are the budget problems at the 3.5-meter
WIYN telescope. In 2013 Yale decided that its research
and academic priorities no longer included WIYN, and it
formally pulled out of the partnership in 2014. This pullout, combined with NOAO's decision to cease its participation, left WIYN with a loss of 57% of its ﬁnancial support.
Since then the remaining partners have been scrambling to ﬁnd others to pick up the shortfall, with mixed
success. In late 2014 they obtained one new partner, the
University of Missouri, but as Salzer noted then, "We are
not at the point of having ﬁ lled our dance card. We are
substantially short of that."
Early in 2015, however, NASA stepped forward and
proposed that, in partnership with the NSF, it assume
the NOAO portion of WIYN's partnership. The deal will
have NASA build and install on WIYN an extremely

Of the four Kitt Peak observatories faced with a budget
crunch, only one, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope,
currently faces shutdown. There is a strong eﬀort to
prevent that shutdown or make it very temporary.
Despite Kitt Peak's improved situation, my evening
with Trueblood and Lebofsky at the 2.1-meter remains
bittersweet. While the telescope might be saved, it wasn't
going to be saved for them. Under the telescope's new
partnership, serious, independent researchers will only
have access to 20 nights per year; the other nights now
belong to those paying for its operation.
And although the larger national observatory instruments in the works will also be open to all, competition
will be stiﬀer on these big-aperture scopes, and there
will be fewer nights available. The question of where
independent astronomers will go in the future for telescope time remains unanswered. ✦
When he isn't watching astronomers locate dangerous asteroids, S&T Contributing Editor Robert Zimmerman is posting regularly on his website, Behind the Black, on science,
technology, politics, and culture: behindtheblack.com.

PETE MARENFELD / NOAO / AURA / NSF

NOAO / AURA / NSF

The Future

CLOUDY SKIES FOR SOLAR TELESCOPE The McMathPierce Solar Telescope ties with Big Bear Observatory for world's
largest solar telescope, with an aperture of 1.6 meters. This
interior shot looks up the instrument's tunnel (the telescope
has a focal length of 87 meters). The telescope's ﬁnancial future
remains unclear.

Sk yandTelescope.com August 2015

http://www.behindtheblack.com http://www.SkyandTelescope.com

Sky and Telescope - August 2015

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