Tucked away atop the roof of the Fitzgerald building sits the school of physics’ WHS Monck Observatory. For every well-worn college path there are an equal if not greater number of hidden nooks and crannies, and the existence of a functioning observatory in the middle of campus is undoubtedly one of them. It is tricky to spot from the ground – if you crane your neck you can just about catch a glimpse of the dome’s pale hump behind the parapets. Many students seem unaware it’s there at all. The Monck is not open to the public nor the general student body, one of the drawbacks of its rooftop location. Joe McCauley, senior experimental officer at the school of physics, was kind enough to give me a tour of the place, and I spoke with him about the Monck’s history and its role within the physics department.
The Monck was funded and built by the school of physics in 2006-2007, and officially opened in a ceremony in December 2008 with acclaimed astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. It is named after William Henry Stanley Monck (1839-1915), a Trinity graduate who became the first to electrically measure starlight in an 1892 experiment with George Fitzgerald (namesake to the physics building).
The dome’s motorised outer shell spins to let us in, then encloses us in whirring darkness while it does a 180 to open the observing window.
As observatories go, the Monck is a humble thing. Its fiberglass dome is 10 feet in diameter, big enough to fit about three or four people inside before things start getting cramped. The dome’s motorised outer shell spins to let us in, then encloses us in whirring darkness while it does a 180 to open the observing window. In the centre of this circular space stands a Meade LX200 14-inch aperture telescope, its mount fixed to the building to reduce interfering vibrations. The Monck’s telescopic equipment is (high-quality) amateur stock in line with the departmental budget. The LX200 costs around 5-6k and can do much of anything you imagine a standard telescope doing. McCauley has taken some wonderful detailed ‘moonrise’ pictures using it (see the physics website). Sitting atop the hefty LX200 is a much smaller piece of equipment which costs about the same: a 6-centimetre solar telescope. This piece of kit is equipped with a ‘H-alpha’ (656.3 nm) filter, meaning it is tuned to a very narrow wavelength which filters out all solar rays harmful to the naked eye. It can be pointed directly at the sun, useful for observing and capturing images of the chromosphere. (The morning McCauley gives me this tour the quintessential Dublin weather has turned on a dime from blue skies to overcast, so a practical demonstration is sadly off the cards).
The dome is also equipped with an Atmospheric and Space Weather Monitor (AWESOME), used for studying things like solar flares. The ionized upper layer of our atmosphere reacts strongly to the x-ray and ultraviolet radiation emitted during such weather events, causing what are known as Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances (SIDs) which are picked up by the monitor.
A combination of weather issues and consistent staff availability meant the Monck was not ideal for intensive research work like capstone projects.
The observatory was initially intended for final year undergraduate work; however, it has not been used as an active student facility since around 2012. Nowadays its main function is in the department’s outreach efforts. McCauley explains that a combination of weather issues and consistent staff availability were not ideal for intensive research work like capstone projects. Of course, the Monck was never meant to measure up to larger telescopes like Trinity’s Rosse Observatory at Birr Castle, Offaly, which is part of an international network of LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) stations spread out from Latvia to Birr.
The natural limitations of the Monck’s relatively small-sized equipment meant that even at the best of times “no one student ever got all their data from this telescope”. Instead results were always drawn from several sources, for example by using some experimental data from the Monck coupled with existing data from the Hubble telescope. This is a way of working “that’s actually very common for astronomy projects,” McCauley says. “You look at a variety of different instruments and you get the data from those, collate it, see how things hang together, look at the capabilities of one instrument versus the other etcetera.”
“Being in the city doesn’t help, but it’s not the dealbreaker you’d think it is,”
I ask if the city centre location has much of an impact: “Being in the city doesn’t help, but it’s not the dealbreaker you’d think it is,” McCauley says. One of the most powerful parts of the Monck is its solar telescope, whose results are not affected by light pollution in the same way as an ordinary telescope would be. The more major weather problem is unreliable cloud cover, which makes keeping a reliable research schedule difficult. There is some concern over light pollution, especially with floodlights on adjacent buildings and glare from the rugby pitch at night. Professor Brian Espey of the department currently has a monitor system set up beside the observatory dome which is gathering data on campus light pollution levels.
Given the efforts needed to coordinate between Dublin weather, student-staff availability, and rooftop accessibility concerns, the rate of return in the quality of the results at the Monck just not high enough to have it be used for capstone work when students can instead be sent to gather their data using higher spec astronomical equipment on location at Birr.
Today the observatory’s main function is as part of the school of physics’ outreach work. For special occasions like the transit of Venus in 2012 the department set up a webcam on the telescope, as well as bringing a smaller (11-inch) telescope out to front square to mark the occasion. The observatory also sees a lot of use in Trinity’s physics TY programme and one-off events like European Researcher’s Night. In the department’s eyes, this is important for keeping a healthy influx of students into the world of science. “Never underestimate the value of outreach – that’s bums on seats for ten years down the line.”
“This observatory is one of these things that got here before anybody really worried too much about [health and safety]. Now we call it ‘grandfathered-in’.”
Due to its rooftop location, opening up the observatory for student access beyond this is tricky, and staff supervision required at all times. I ask if the observatory could have been set up today given College’s stricter health and safety regulations (the Fitzgerald is a listed building). “I think it would be very difficult,” McCauley replies. “This [the observatory] is one of these things that got here before anybody really worried too much about that. Now we call it ‘grandfathered-in’.”
“It would be nice to have people come and go as they pleased but … we’re never going to have a free-for-all access here [on the roof]. We don’t want anybody hurt. It sounds terribly inconvenient, stopping people doing what they’d love to be doing, but there are good reasons for it.” McCauley pauses, then adds wryly: “I mean okay look, I’m also the safety officer for the school of physics. I don’t necessarily like it, but I understand it.”
What’s next for the Monck Observatory? The brunt of the research load has been taken up by the Birr facility, which leaves this smaller observatory in a sort of limbo. The department has no plans to upgrade, aside perhaps from the dome which may need some repair soon. But nor will it be abandoned; the Monck may be off limits for most, but it certainly isn’t going anywhere. “We keep this at the level [of use] that it’s at now, it’s actually okay.” McCauley comments. The outreach work is a worthy cause. “The bottom line is, even though it doesn’t get as much use as we might like it to get, I think it is still worth keeping.”
