Keck Science 2006

The W.M. Keck Observatory, with its twin 10-meter segmented mirror telescopes and a laser-based adaptive optics (AO) system, is a crucial technology pathfinder for the Thirty Meter Telescope. Two of the TMT partners, Caltech and the University of California, are also the managing partners of the Keck Observatory. Because of these close connections, we are including news from the Keck Observatory in this Newscast.

The annual Keck Observatory Science Meeting was held September 15, 2006, at the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA. There were more than 120 participants, 25 talks and 35 poster presentations. Continuing a trend from 2005, results based on the laser guide star AO system on Keck 2 had a very high profile at the meeting. The unprecedented breadth of science presented ranged from discoveries of binary asteroids in the Solar System to the results of searches for the first quasars at redshifts greater than 7 (none yet). The first science results from OSIRIS, the integral-field spectrometer that works behind the adaptive optics system, show the tremendous potential for this capability at Keck and eventually TMT.

The final talk of the day was presented by new Keck Director Taft Armandroff (pictured at right). Taft laid out a broad vision for the future of the observatory which highlighted the recently funded program to design the “Next Generation Adaptive Optics System” at Keck.

Talks from the meeting can be downloaded at http://www.physics.uci.edu/~barth/ksm2006/