10/22/2024
KISAH SEBENAR TELESKOP TEGAK USAS
(dipetik dari buku, "USAS Vertical Telescope")
Norul, the leader of USAS vertical telescope first had a thought of such optical configuration when he was an Astronomy and Astrophysics student at Valparaiso University in Indiana, the USA while visiting Yerkes Observatory near Chicago in 1990. Yerkes Observatory is the home of a very large refracting telescope which has an objective diameter of 102cm and a tube length of 18.3m. To accommodate such a large refractor, the observatory had a dome of 27m diameter.
Back in 1990, the refractor was still in operation although it had been installed at the observatory for more than a century before. Since the tube of the refractor was so long, when the refractor was employed to observe objects very high in the sky, the floor of the observatory had be lowered and when it was used to observe objects very low near the horizon, the floor had to be raised, meaning the whole floor of the observatory was an elevator. The reason was because the long telescope was mounted on a large and heavy mount and it had to be swung to be oriented at the astronomical objects. Having a large elevator floor of 27m diameter was a very complicated and expensive solution.
Norul had a thought that his country, Malaysia will never have a large astronomical observatory if such observatory needs such a huge and expensive building to accommodate such a large telescope and mount. He realized that even a very large telescope can be “small” if the parameter measured or concerned is only the diameter of its objective, not the length of its tube. To make that possible the telescope needs to be stationary at vertical, not to be swung on a mount. By making the telescope fixed at vertical, a mount is not needed and the building to accommodate it need not be large, but only enough to provide an ample space for the diameter of the telescope’s objective. What needed to enable the telescope to observe the sky at all direction is just a system of mirrors above the telescope’s objective that can be rotated in synchronization.
Although Norul had worked at the National Planetarium in 1992 where he operated an observatory with a 14 inches telescope, he did not pursue his idea of vertical telescope. He only started to seriously considering developing vertical telescope 30 years later when he started working at USAS (Universiti Sultan Azlan Shah) beginning 2021 since he had been allowed to explore and develop new ideas in his field by the visionary top management team of the university. Therefore Norul had drawn the first technical drawings of vertical telescope when he was teaching Astronomy/Falak at USAS in 2022, which soon was submitted to MyIPO (Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia).
The top management of USAS has encouraged and assisted Norul in designing the vertical telescope because the university had been trying to request a budget to build an astronomical observatory and have found that the high cost of such observatory was mostly to cover the construction of the observatory building and installation of the telescope mount. They understood that the cost could have been less if only a small building was needed and the telescope mount can be omitted. They too came up with a similar idea of having a telescope without the need of a huge and expensive building and a large and heavy telescope mount.
USAS submitted Norul’s drawing of vertical telescope to MyIPO in November 2022. USAS was awarded the certificate by MyIPO for registering the Vertical Telescope Industrial Design 2 years later.
It was bless that although the top management of USAS are not manned by scientists and engineers, they encourage scientific and engineering ideas and activities. USAS vertical telescope was a result of such a vision.
Vertical telescope enables the construction of astronomical observatories out of simple and low cost conventional buildings.
