The 2000s - Stromlo and Siding Spring Today

In September 2007 Harvey Butcher took over as Director of Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, where he undertook his PhD in the 1970s researching nucleosynthesis in the galaxy under the supervision of Mike Bessell and Alex Rodgers. One reason Butcher chose Stromlo was his eagerness to conduct research using the 74-inch Telescope’s Coude Spectrograph, and to complete this research he constructed one of the first high-resolution echelle spectrographs in the world. 

After completing his PhD at Stromlo, Butcher worked at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and the Kitt Peak National Observatory. After nine years he relocated to Groningen University in The Netherlands to work on the construction of a new observatory at La Palma in the Canary Islands. He spent the next 25 years there. During this time, he collaborated with Augustus Oemler Jnr studying the colours of galaxies in distant galaxy clusters. Their claim that cluster members were forming stars became known as the Butcher-Oemler effect (Bhathal, Sutherland & Butcher, 2014). This theory was later confirmed by Stromlo researchers Barry Newell and Warrick Couch. 

Butcher spent 16 years as Director of the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON). At ASTRON he was involved in radio astronomy research and developing instrumentation for radio and infrared astronomy. Most significantly, ASTRON and Butcher worked on the development of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope and Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, the largest telescope ever built.   

While planning his retirement, Butcher received a call from Stromlo astronomer Ken Freeman, who encouraged him to apply for the director’s role at Stromlo. When Butcher took over in 2007, he faced significant issues. The budget for the Observatory and School had experienced several successive years of cuts, and many academic and technical staff left following the 2003 bushfires. Despite this, the School was home to two exciting projects, both based at Siding Spring Observatory – Michael Dopita’s Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) and Brian Schmidt’s very wide field telescope SkyMapper, the latter would be used to produce a survey of the southern sky. Butcher’s focus was to support these projects as well as driving the participation of the team in the international Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project and recruit talented young researchers under a new fellowship program. The University’s participation in the GMT project, which was first proposed under former Director Penny Sackett, was groundbreaking and Butcher considered this as “his most important and enduring achievement as Director”, bringing talented researchers and technicians to the Observatory as well as new cutting-edge equipment (Bhathal, Sutherland & Butcher, 2014).

Since the decimation of Mount Stromlo Observatory in the 2003 bushfires, there has been a remarkable period of redevelopment and growth. The workshops that were lost have been replaced by the Advanced Instrumentation Technology Centre, with opened in stages between 2006 and 2014.  

The AITC provides cutting-edge capabilities in the development of high-performance instrumentation for ground-based telescopes and space missions, including precision manufacturing, rapid prototyping and the testing and evaluation of small spacecrafts. This significantly expands Australia’s capabilities in research and development for the space industry.     

The SkyMapper Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory replaced some of the lost capabilities at Stromlo following the 2003 bushfires. It first began operating in 2008 and its mission is to robotically create a unique digital survey of the entire southern sky. The result is a massively detailed record of nearly a billion stars and galaxies, to a sensitivity one million times fainter than the human eye can see, and the data is freely available to the scientific and general community. This data allows astronomers to discover rare types of stars in our Galaxy, map the dark matter which makes up most of our Galaxy, and uncover the first quasars and stars to form in the Universe. Additionally, the SkyMapper Telescope locates stars and galaxies for future investigation using the next generation of extremely large optical telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), and state of the art radio astronomy facilities such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder and the Square Kilometre Array, which is currently under construction in Western Australia. 

In 2009, a Wide-Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) was designed and built by the ANU Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics and installed at the 2.3m Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. WiFeS is an integral-field, or imaging, spectrograph, meaning that it records a spectrum from each pixel of the region that is imaged. Astronomers at Siding Spring are using WiFeS to observe Gamma-Ray Bursts, study old stars in our Galaxy, study masses being ejected from young stars to better understand how planets form, measure internal motions in galaxies to search for black holes in their cores and dark matter in their outer parts, and study the motions of gas around distant quasars and radio galaxies.

Engineers and technicians at the ANU Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics have also designed and manufactured the Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager (GSAOI) for the Gemini South Telescope in Chile. The GSAOI is a $6.3 million, wide-field, infrared camera that produces images comparable to those produced by the Hubble Space Telescope. It works in conjunction with the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS), which uses a technique called adaptive optics to remove the blurring and movement that Earth's atmosphere adds to stellar images. The first images were produced on 16 December 2011. 

Across the ANU Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics there are approximately 90 staff, most of whom work at Mount Stromlo Observatory, where the main workshops and support facilities are located. There are about 45 astronomers on staff, and there are also around 30 graduate students undertaking PhD studies at the school.