The antenna is for the radio telephone. All observers had to remember these words, "station 3143 to Albuquerque, over", and to never get the radio telephone operation mad at you.
Capilla Peak Observatory is a research facility owned and operated by the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of New Mexico. In 1980, Capilla was instrumented with a home-made computer-controlled photomutiplier assembly. These images from 20 years ago give you some idea of the environment and facilities. The telescope now hosts a fully computer controlled CCD imaging system. Click on an image to see a larger version.
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Capilla is located ten miles up a twisty dirt road just outside the very small town of Monzano. For most of the year a four wheel drive SUV is required to gain access to the facility. |
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Capilla is a no-frills operation. Here we see the dome that houses the
61cm (24") Boller & Chivens Cassegrain telescope (with quartz mirrors). The trick
was to enter the observatory at the beginning of the season and not get pummeled by moths
when you first opened the doors. The antenna is for the radio telephone. All observers had to remember these words, "station 3143 to Albuquerque, over", and to never get the radio telephone operation mad at you. |
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Here is the Capilla observing room as I first saw it. This was my kind of observatory. It needed me. |
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The telescope was instrumented with a photometer and a solar spectrograph. You could drop the photometer head (both literally and figuratively) and put in a 3 inch eyepiece. Most astronomers today will never know what it's like to see the Orion Nebula with their own eyes. |
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Here is an image of the finder. To locate objects, you manually slewed the telescope to the approximate RA and Dec, then you got up on the ladder, looked through the finder, and zeroed in on the correct location based on the patters in the star field. |