Bid Your Way into the Keck Control Room

mopuxak writes "There's an article featured over at space.com about an ongoing EBay auction to spend a night in Hawaii's Keck Observatory with Astronomer Geoff Marcy. The money is set to go to the non-profit Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP). Looks like they're billing this as Astronomy's version of Lance Bass and the Space Station. How much would YOU pay?"

Comments

Well....

[MrIcee]

I live on the Big Island and can at this very moment, in fact, see the Keck observatory as a little white pimple on the top of Mauna Kea, from my computer room.

Keck is a very important observatory, and one of the many observatories up there. Since it placed adaptive optics into it's facility a couple years ago they have been producing stunning photographs and research.

However, how much would I pay to sit in their control room? Not much. Anyone can go up to the top of Mauna Kea for free, and hang around. Free tours of Keck are offered daily. You wouldn't be able to do/see much since the telescope time is so highly booked (e.g., you would see what was going on currently).

Another down side is that your at 13,800 ft. The air is very thin and altitude sickness is very very common. Not to mention that it is extremely cold up there.

There are better ways to enjoy Hawaii :)

Re:Well....

[dpp]

Another down side is that your at 13,800 ft. The air is very thin and altitude sickness is very very common. Not to mention that it is extremely cold up there.

Very true, although Keck do remote observing from the much more comfortable environment of Waimea. From the auction:

The observatory headquarters, Visiting Scientists' Quarters, and control rooms are located in Waimea, at about 2,500 feet.

Re:Well....

[Idarubicin]

How much do you think that would be worth?

Each of the two Keck telescopes cost about $94 million U.S. to construct. If we amortize that over twenty years, that's five million per year, $14,000 per day, or nearly six hundred dollars per hour. You'll settle for one Keck, right?

And that's just your sticker price. Actually operating the damn thing requires a lot of money. This site gives a figure of about a dollar per second--that's about four thousand dollars an hour. It's not cheap to haul astronomers, mirror bits, refrigeration units, and everything else up a mountain, you know.

Oh, and if it's cloudy while you're up there, too bad. You can apply for more time now, but your request likely won't be granted for another year or so. Not that the group responsible for adminstering the Kecks would let you play with their toy anyway. There are real scientific projects that already suck up all the available observing time--and many more waiting in the wings that would kill for some. Do you think that CERN would let you mess around with their collider?

Your best bet for getting to play with mid-scale scientific toys (linear accelerators, van de Graff generators, telescopes in the three meter class, and so forth) would be to befriend someone at a university owning such facilities. Once you know the right people, you can get in for free.

I wouldn't pay. . . .

[astrobabe]

1- I am an astronomer so I wouldn't pay at all, I'd just apply for time through CalTech which is where I work for SIRTF 2- While whomever pays for this will get a spiffy tour of the telescopes will probably wind up in the control room at Waimea which is not on the mountain. Why? Because generally astronomers are out of shape or get loopy at altitude. The way to minimize stupid mistakes is to only let the operators move the telescope and tweak the instruments and keep the astronomers down near sea level. That said I've done a few dumb things at telescopes myself when it was 3 am and I just wanted to go to bed at telescopes at only 7000 ft altitude. . .