I’m Not Scared

In the days of astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Alan Sandage, before computers were widespread, using observatory telescopes to study the cosmos was grueling work.

Astronomers had to climb atop platforms on the sides of the giant instruments and constantly monitor the night sky to keep in focus those stars whose light were being slowly collected onto photographic plates. "They would be up there for hours, in the cold and dark by themselves," said Scott Kardel, a spokesman for the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. A telescope's speed had to be continually adjusted by tapping buttons on a control paddle, and on the morning after a cold night, an astronomer might find that his tears had frozen him to the eyepiece. But those days are long gone. Automated telescopes are now doing work once done by tortured astronomers, and thanks to a new high speed wireless microwave network, today's digitally captured images can be beamed down from mountain observatories and quickly distributed to astronomers living thousands of miles away.

Called the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network, or HPWREN for short, it can transfer data at 45 megabits-per-second, or about 30 times faster than today's fastest DSL connections. One megabit is equal to 1 million bits. Future upgrades are expected to make the network even faster, said Hans-Werner Braun, the HPWREN principal investigator and a research scientist at the San Diego Computer Center at the University of California, San Diego. "The current plan is to upgrade critical links that support the [Palomar] observatory to 155 Mbps and create a