Grammar Gazette- Issue 2, 2017

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FACULTY OF WONDER AND AWE: THE DOROTHY HILL OBSERVATORY

Helena Payne (12H) with the 356mm reflecting telescope at the Main Campus prior to its transport to and installation at Marrapatta

Astronomy has the ability to be astonishing and, with the recent launch of the Dorothy Hill Observatory at the Marrapatta Memorial Outdoor Education Centre, Brisbane Girls Grammar School has the extraordinary opportunity to share this wonderful branch of Science with students in myriad novel and exciting ways. Optical telescopes collect light from the sky and focus this light into a person’s eye or onto a camera. The three main types of optical telescopes achieve this in different ways. Reflecting telescopes use mirrors to reflect light to the eye, refracting telescopes use lenses to bend light toward the eye and catadioptric telescopes use a combination of both mirrors and lenses. Each type of telescope design comes with benefits and drawbacks that make it suitable for observing particular objects in space. The Dorothy Hill Observatory takes advantage of all three designs, as well as a wide array of cameras, filters, imaging software and computer-controlled mounts, to collect a broad range of images and astrometric data that will deepen Grammar girls’ understanding of the universe.

AUTHOR Ms Gerri Bernard Science Teacher

One of the most important photographs in history was taken in December of 1995, not by an individual person, but by a telescope. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Hubble telescope had been orbiting the Earth for five years when a group of astronomers decided to point it at a very small and seemingly uninteresting patch of the northern hemisphere sky. They were not expecting to see an astonishing collection of more than 3 000 entire galaxies, each comprising billions of individual stars, all in an area of sky smaller than the tip of a fingernail held at arm’s length. This incredible photograph, the Hubble Deep Field image, changed our view of the universe as a cold, empty expanse and led us to an understanding of the richness and abundance of the cosmos.

GRAMMAR GAZETTE