The twinkle of starlight may disappear in Williams Bay, Wis., this weekend.
It will be removed by a “Star Wars” device installed at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, attached to a 41-inch reflecting telescope that is being trained on Jupiter.
Astronomers hope the device will yield some of the clearest images of the anticipated collision of comet fragments with Jupiter of any ground-based telescope in the world.
The high-tech preparations at Yerkes are no more feverish than those of thousands of amateur and professional astronomers in the Chicago area who are hoping to witness a once-in-a-lifetime, six-day space spectacle.
Twenty large fragments of the comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9, are expected to slam into Jupiter between about 2:55 p.m. Saturday and 2:55 a.m. July 22.
Stores that sell telescopes say sales have been brisk in anticipation of the collision. Public observatories, such as the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the Cernan Earth and Space Center at Triton College in River Grove, expect big crowds.
Local astronomical societies have been busy over the last year instructing members on what to look for in the collision, but there may not be much to see, since the fragments will hit the backside of Jupiter.
Scientists say astronomers may detect the collisions by bursts of reflected light coming off Jupiter’s moons, or by new patterns in the colorful swirling gases that make up the giant planet’s atmosphere.
If the weather turns cloudy, there will, of course, be nothing to see at all.
“This is a great mystery,” said William Becker, vice president of the Chicago Astronomical Society, “because we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.”
Two University of Chicago astronomers, Hien Nguyen and John Briggs, have been at the South Pole since January, manning a 24-inch infrared telescope. Locked into 24 hours a day of polar winter darkness, theirs is the only earthbound telescope that will be trained on Jupiter continuously through the impact period.
At Yerkes, astronomers Edward Kibblewhite and Walter Wild will be able to target Jupiter for only about two hours of “prime time” viewing after sundown each night.
Wild has been in charge of installing the Star Wars equipment, called an “adaptive optics” system.
“Air in the atmosphere is constantly shifting and moving, forming little pockets and cells that vary in fractions of degrees here and there,” Wild said. “Those little pockets are like lenses that distort light that passes through them as it comes to us from outer space.
“When you train a telescope at small objects, you can’t discern things. They look fuzzy and indistinct. Because of distortion, you are losing a lot of information. The reason we put Hubble in space was to get above the atmosphere. You can resolve details on a telescope in space 10 times better than any ground-based telescope.”
The $80 million system is designed to eliminate the light distortions. It is those distortions that make stars appear to “twinkle.”
The adaptive optics system diverts some of the light entering the telescope to a sensor that describes the constantly changing atmospheric conditions between the telescope and the object it is trained on.
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That information is processed through a high-speed computer that sends instructions to a flat, flexible mirror with hundreds of pistons pushing and pulling on the mirror’s surface. Called a “rubber mirror,” it minutely changes its surface 4,000 times a second to mitigate for atmospheric distortion.
The military built the adaptive optics system for the space shuttle, as a part of a plan to develop laser weapons that could shoot down interballistic missiles. It never made a shuttle flight, nor has it ever been used to peer into the heavens.
“Depending on cloud cover, tonight or tomorrow will be the first time it (the adaptive optics system) will have seen an astronomical object,” Wild said Thursday.