The steward observatory is a department of the University of Arizona, paired with its Astronomy department. The department was originally housed under one building on campus in 1916, but its subsidiaries have since spread to 5 locations in Arizona, one in New Mexico and one in Chile. The observatory gets its name from the request of Lavinia Steward who, at a $60,000 suggestion, had it named in memory of her late husband. Spread out between Mt Bigelow and Mt Hopkins, Steward is also a partner of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico. More importantly, it maintains a student facility about three miles east of the campus.

 

The world renown work going on today is accredited to a DR. Roger Angel, who in a back yard experiment found that the honeycomb structure in Borosilicate glass (used in ovenware) could provide much bigger mirrors. By simply refining his experiment of fusing two custard cups in a homemade kiln, he managed to cast three 1.8m mirrors. Of course once word got out and military funding stepped in, his talent for mirror making elevated his operation to provide mirrors for the best telescopes in the world, including the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in 1997.

 

Now a fully fledged government assisted operation, the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab (SOML) has now totaled an impressive 14 mirrors ranging in size from 1.2m to 8.4m, nearly all of which are currently in operation in various telescopes. With their last big casting going to Chile in 2001, they have since been working on the creation and physical support of the GMT 1-3 mirrors, that promise to surpass all previous works.

 

‘The world’s most challenging large mirror ever made’. This is how Steward have advertised their new GMT mirrors, each consisting of seven 8.4m individual pieces that weigh around 10 tonnes.

 

The GMT 1 mirror is now complete and the GMT 2 will follow with the 3 soon after. Once completed, the GMT 3 will have 10 times the resolution power of Hubble and will weigh 20 tonnes. The Steward Observatory boasts a collection of well-known telescopes, such as the 1.6m Kuiper telescope and the 0.7m Schmidt, as well as some lesser known ones like the Large Binocular Telescope. This, as the name suggests, is the combined effort of two 8.4m scopes that increase the surface area of the other by working in unison.

 

Information kindly provided by Myles Henry, University of South Wales.