Southern Arizona will contribute to a 24-hour live video webcast today called "Around the World in 80 Telescopes," in which viewers can tune in to watch segments from 80 different astronomical observatories.
The international event kicks off at 2 a.m. today in Hawaii. The webcast will then travel west, with the streaming video from five Arizona facilities broadcasting live toward the end of the event, after stops that include Australia, Spain and Chile.
Twenty-minute consecutive webcasts will include astronomical images, information about telescopes and research and offer a behind-the-scenes perspective on the facilities, with live interview with astronomers from each observatory.
At 10:40 p.m., the world's most powerful optical telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, will be featured.
At 11:20 p.m., another telescope on Mount Graham, the Arizona Radio Observatory's Submillimeter Telescope, which researches the chemistry of space, will be shown.
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At 11:35, yet another Mount Graham telescope will be featured: the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope.
At 11:50 p.m. the webcast will move to the MMT Observatory on Mount Hopkins, about 30 miles south of Tucson.
Finally, after a stop in space to feature the Kepler Mission and then a visit to the South Pole, the webcast will return to Southern Arizona at 12:40 a.m. Saturday, as it hits the Kitt Peak National Observatory.
The webcast will be hosted at the European Organization for Astronomical Research headquarters in Munich, Germany. Sponsored by the International Astronomical Union, it is part of an event called "100 Hours of Astronomy" to commemorate the International Year of Astronomy.
Grant Williams, associate director of the MMT Observatory, will host the segment from Mount Hopkins.
"They've really done a superb job coordinating the event, and I hope it's well-received by the community," said Williams, who will be answering prepared questions about the observatory and his research on high-mass stars.
"It's a great thing for astronomy in Southern Arizona for all of us to be involved with such an elite group of observatories," he said. "It's a testament to our place in astronomy."
See it live
Click here to watch the webcast and get more information on the observatories.
