BU team keeps a powerful eye on the sky

One night this month, that cold, hard work paid off. Using a specialized telescope add-on that his BU-based team had spent three years building, Janes managed to snap a picture of the galaxy Messier 74.

"Though the weather was bad and it was raining, the sky cleared up for a moment and we were able to point the telescope at the galaxy and take the picture, just to show that it works," said Janes.

The shot itself wasn't so extraordinary, but the image marked a major achievement for the BU team, and the beginning of a new line of work for a desert observatory with a longstanding Boston connection.

Pioneering research at the Lowell Observatory goes back almost 110 years to 1894, when Boston mathematician and amateur astronomer Percival Lowell decided to build an observatory on a hill in Flagstaff. At an elevation of 7,000 feet, Flagstaff offers near-perfect viewing conditions: Its skies are dark and because the area is so dry, its atmosphere contains less image-distorting water vapor than most places.

Lowell spent 15 years peering through the observatory's Clark telescope, studying Mars, making extensive sketches, and proposing the now disproved theory of a Martian canal system. Lowell -- who acted as foreign secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the United States and wrote several books about East Asia before dedicating himself, rather suddenly, to astronomy -- is perhaps best known for proposing the existence of Planet X (now known as Pluto).

Using the Lowell Observatory in 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh was the first to locate Pluto in the sky. The observatory is also known for V.M. Slipher's research early in the 20th century that generated the first evidence that the universe is expanding. Today, the Lowell Observatory remains one of the largest privately operated nonprofit astronomical research observatories in the world.

Five years ago, the observatory and BU set up a partnership to operate the observatory's 72-inch Perkins telescope. The telescope, built in the 1920s, was still considered a powerful telescope but it needed updating.

"Modern telescopes require fairly sophisticated instruments . . . to enable different kinds of research," said Janes. In exchange for access to the Perkins telescope 180 nights a year, BU agreed to contribute to the telescope's maintenance costs and build state-of-the-art instruments for it.

The result of that cooperation, the new PRISM, a specialized lens that helps analyze light and widens the Perkins's view, will extend the observatory's research capabilities.

"PRISM (which stands for Perkins Re-Imaging System) is a very flexible instrument that will be a workhorse for our Perkins telescope," said Ted Dunham, instrument scientist at the Lowell Observatory. "It's a huge asset that really enhances the performance of the telescope."

PRISM's major role is to shrink the size of the image that the telescope sends to its computers. "This creates the effect of giving you a much wider field of view on sky," Dunham said.

Janes will be using PRISM in his ongoing studies of stars, looking for star clusters that are similar in age to our sun to predict the likelihood of solar activity -- like the solar storm that hit earth last month -- and what might happen to the sun 100 or 1,000 years from now.

PRISM's ability to survey and monitor a much larger field of stars makes it easier for Janes to find brightness changes of less than 1/10th of a percent and to monitor stars over a period to years to see just how often the star spots occur and then relate their history of activity to our sun.

"There's also a more exotic aspect to our research with PRISM," said Janes. "There's a possibility that I might actually discover a planet around one of these stars that we're watching. If we see a dip in the brightness of a star for a few hours that could be from the planet [passing] in front of the star. That would be exciting."