Facilities
CARMA: The Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) is operated jointly by a consortium of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and the University of Maryland, with the partner Universities having guaranteed observing time. At a new high-altitude site in eastern California, CARMA provides unparalleled sensitivity, broad frequency coverage, sub-arcsecond resolution and wide-field heterogeneous imaging capabilities, along with innovative technologies and educational opportunities. It is currently the most powerful telescope of its type in the world.
UnISIS: The University of Illinois Seeing Improvement System (UnISIS) laser guided adaptive optics system at the Mt. Wilson 2.5-m telescope produces near-diffraction limited images over the wavelength range 900 nm to 2.5 ?m. Two imaging cameras, one for visible wavelengths and one for near-IR, simultaneously collect data.
NCSA: A number of projects in the Department of Astronomy are partnering with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois. This includes development and application of astrophysical simulations such as the FLASH package and general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic codes that provide insight into the nature of structure formation and the physics of black holes. Astronomy faculty also leverage NCSA's pioneering development of cyberinfrastructure environments to facilitate data transport for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Palomar-Quest project, the CARMA project, the Dark Energy Survey, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. NCSA and the Astronomy Department also jointly founded the Laboratory for Cosmological Data Mining to apply novel algorithms to the rich datasets now available for cosmological analysis, including those from the SDSS and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
The department is also involved in ESA/NASA's Planck space mission to obtain the definitive maps of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. The department is one of only a few selected U.S. institutions to be involved in this major international endeavor in cosmology.