Watch out, koi pond. There’s a bigger fish planning to make its home on the AQ lawn, and it’s a $4.4 million observatory.
With financial support from the Trottier Foundation, headed by Lorne and Louise Trottier, SFU Burnaby will become home to the Trottier Observatory and Courtyard, set to be completed August, 2014.
The observatory will offer a range of programs including beginners’ astronomy courses for both SFU science and social science students in addition to permanent community outreach programs. Courses such as these may be offered within the next two years.
“[The observatory] is in part for science geeks, but it’s much broader than that. Everyone is curious about the universe,” said Howard Trottier.
Students taking the beginners’ astronomy course can expect to learn about the operation of the telescope: how to process its data as well as the physics behind it. Assignments may include looking for exoplanets around other stars and using information from previous discoveries to conduct analyses.
An amateur astronomer and SFU professor of physics, Trottier has been working on the observatory project for over seven years. The project lay dormant, until Trottier was able to involve his brother and sister-in-law who are now providing funding for the institution.
The observatory will be located near Strand Hall on the AQ lawn and will feature a 0.7-metre diameter reflector telescope within a six-metre-diameter dome.
The mandate of the observatory is threefold: public outreach, undergraduate education, and allowing outside schools to use the observatory remotely. Not only will visitors to the Burnaby campus be able to use its telescope to view and capture photos of distant galaxies billions of years old, but its remote capabilities will allow interested parties across the country to access it.
“SFU, as a community-oriented university, really plugs into that very well, and so we’re going to reach the entire province, and even beyond eventually,” said Trottier.
The building itself may spread beyond the AQ lawn, penetrating the concrete walls of the AQ itself. “The proposal is to actually extend [a cosmic timeline] into the AQ and have it line up with one of the stairways,” explained Trottier. “We would have a connection into the heartland of the campus, and that would be really exciting.”
The observatory and accompanying science plaza will be open in September. “It sounds ridiculous, but the architects say it’s a small building so it’s easy,” Trottier explained. “It’s going to be a destination place to hangout.”
