Credit: Wikimedia
2011 marks the centenary of astronomy at the Mt Stromlo Observatory of the Australian National University in Canberra. It was a hundred years ago when the diminutive Oddie Telescope appeared on the then remote hillside overlooking the pastoral valley that would become Australia's capital.
During WWII, the staff and engineers preoccupied themselves with the production of optical munitions. After the war the facility became the Commonwealth Observatory with particular emphasis on solar studies and exploration of the Milky Way, who's broad swath arcs beautifully over the mountain on a winter's evening.
The 1.9m telescope built in 1956 was for almost two decades the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere until the advent of the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope.
Over decades of operation as the Observatory's workhorse facility, the 1.9m repeatedly broke the records for the youngest, oldest and most distant objects known, until its untimely demise in the fires of 2003.
In 1957 the Observatory was incorporated into the Australian National University. Although protected under federal legislation by a 2km boundary to development, the lights of the ever-expanding city of Canberra required the establishment of the remote dark sky site, and 1962 saw the establishment of Siding Spring Observatory located outside of Coonabarabran in central NSW.
Australian National University astronomers have been at the forefront of Australian astronomical endeavours. Particularly influential in understanding our place in the universe have been a series of large collaborative programs.
In the mid-1990s, then director Jeremy Mould (now of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne) was instrumental in establishing and progressing the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to determine the Hubble constant, a constant in the local universe that describes the rate of expansion of the universe.
At this time it was widely considered that the universe contained just enough matter for the combined gravitational pull of all this matter to halt the expansion of the universe at some point in the distant future. It was already known that there was not enough luminous matter to do this: mysterious dark matter dominates how stars rotate about their galaxies and how galaxies grow and age.
Was it possible that a vast reserve of mass might be hidden in the form of large lumps of ordinary matter - dead stars, planets and black holes? Addressing this question was the goal of the MACHO project. In collaboration with partners at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S., the MACHO project saw the deployment of the largest digital cameras outside of military application to astronomy.
Over seven years the MACHO program monitored millions of stars every clear night in our nearest neighbouring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The brightness of each star was examined for changes brought about by a dark clump of matter passing close to the line of sight of the star.
