From ashes, a return to star-gazing

When a searing brush fire savaged the Canberra region two years ago, it destroyed one of astronomy's crown jewels: the Mt. Stromlo Observatory.

In 20 minutes on this gently rounded mountaintop, the fire incinerated five telescopes and their domes, a historic administration building, a library housing $4 million worth of volumes, and a workshop building cutting-edge custom detectors and optics systems for telescopes around the globe. It was so hot the aluminum on the site burned and brass fittings fused together.

One of the few structures to escape destruction: the visitors' center. "I'd gladly have traded that visitors' center for any telescope on the mountain," says Vince Ford, a research officer at the observatory, driving past soot-blackened shells of buildings.

Now, a little more than two years later, Mt. Stromlo is rising from the ashes. The sounds of power tools reverberate across the summit. And though the observatory isn't laying immediate plans for replacing its research-grade telescopes, officials nevertheless have laid out an ambitious agenda for recovery.

The key parts of their plan: building high-grade astronomical instruments for a new generation of supersized telescopes and mapping - for the first time ever - the entire southern sky.

The recovery here highlights how, despite intense competition among research groups around the world, astronomers and astrophysicists do pull together in the face of disaster.

Here at Mt. Stromlo, workers are busy building new workshops. Facility officials aim to position Mt. Stromlo to become the Stradivarius of astronomical instruments. Australia National University in Canberra, which owns the observatory and its sister facility at Siding Springs, some 335 miles northwest of Sydney, also has begun a small but growing program in designing and building hardware for the business end of telescopes. And, if money allows, officials are considering a new research-class telescope, tentatively dubbed the Phoenix Telescope, for the mountaintop.

Given the changes, "it certainly won't be a carbon copy of the old observatory," says director Penny Sackett.

The pace of recovery draws admiration from astronomers elsewhere.

"Mt. Stromlo was one of the very top research institutions in astrophysics in the world," says Catherine Pilachowski, an astronomy professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. "I've been totally blown away by how successful they've been" at maintaining scientific productivity despite the fire. In 2004, largely through research done since the fire, the observatory's research teams published a record number of results in astronomical journals. "They're just darn good. It may also be that despite the fire, they wanted to show that they weren't beaten down," she adds. "That spirit is an inspiration to everybody."

Some of the credit goes to colleagues around the world, Dr. Pilachowski says. Donations from astronomers and their professional organizations poured in. Researchers scoured their libraries for extra copies of publications, which they bundled up and sent. And observatories worldwide made telescope time available whenever they could to the fire-affected astronomers.

The cornerstone of Mt. Stromlo's renaissance is its digital sky survey and the 1.3-meter telescope the observatory is building for Siding Springs to undertake the cosmic census. The survey is the southern counterpart to the northern hemisphere's Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which aims to map one quarter of the northern sky and gather spectra of the objects it detects. By contrast, the Stromlo Southern Sky Survey aims to cover the whole southern sky six times over three years.

It will leave gathering spectra to other observatories. But it will view the sky though several color filters to give astronomers a rough idea of the makeup of objects the effort will catalog. The telescope is scheduled to get its first glimpse of the sky late next year.

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