In the shadow of Las Vegas, a new place to explore alien worlds

At the edge of a city that considers light pollution a marketing strategy, astronomy buffs have opened the dome on a new telescope aimed as much at young minds as it is the stars above.

The Las Vegas Astronomical Society has finished work on the first of what it hopes will be several telescopes on the far side of Mount Potosi, about 25 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.

Now the group is trying to drum up interest — and perhaps a benefactor or two — to finish other telescope installations at the Boy Scout camp there.

Jim Gianoulakis, vice president of the nearly 35-year-old group, said he wants the observatory to be a resource for valley school children as well as local stargazers.

“The endgame for me is to get into the Clark County School District, get into the classroom,” said Gianoulakis, whose own love of astronomy grew from a childhood trip to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. “I want to give every kid in Vegas the same opportunity. It won’t stick with everyone, but it will stick with some.”

The new 14-inch telescope first went online in early November, and Gianoulakis said the results were immediately impressive.

“I took a picture of the Horsehead Nebula just for grins,” he said. “It was almost a year to the day we first broke ground.”

But the view is far from pristine. The sky to the northeast of the site is dominated by the piercing glow from Las Vegas, though on a dry night Gianoulakis said “our western and southern skies are beautiful.”

“I’ve been in much darker skies, let’s face it,” he said, though he’s happy to trade visibility for accessibility if it furthers the project’s educational mission.

“We could take it out into the middle of nowhere,” he said, ”but if no one ever goes there, what have we accomplished?”

The 14-inch telescope is housed in a small building topped with a fiberglass dome that can be opened remotely using an Internet link. From a computer in his southwest valley home home, Gianoulakis can maneuver the scope and program it to take images of the stars.

Two smaller domes at the site await installation of their own remote-controlled telescopes.

A few feet from the domes is an insulated “warm room” for some dusty computer equipment that helps monitor observatory and keep it connected to the Internet. Right now, the small building provides a welcome escape from the cold at the more-than-mile-high property, but Gianoulakis hopes to make it a classroom some day.

The site also features seven concrete pads with power hook-ups so astronomy club members and other stargazers can set up their scopes on clear nights. The pads and warm room are lit with special red bulbs that provide light without diminishing night vision.

Gianoulakis said the progress so far on the observatory would have been impossible without a great deal of generosity, particularly from the Boy Scouts’ Las Vegas Area Council, which agreed to host the telescopes at its sprawling Kimball Scout Reservation on Mount Potosi in exchange for help with astronomy merit badges for the valley’s roughly 20,000 scouts.

“What you see here is pretty much volunteer labor and (donated) goods and services,” Gianoulakis said. “The Boy Scouts giving us this piece of land was the final piece of the puzzle.”

The project began with the gift of a $40,000, 14-inch Officina Stellare telescope from a doctor in North Carolina. A manufacturer in Minnesota donated the domes. The rest of the work was made possible with $2,500 in seed money from the astronomical society, $13,000 in private contributions and donated services from architects, contractors, Internet service providers and amateur astronomers.

Gianoulakis said he visits the site almost daily.

“It’s been a second job for the last year and a half or so, but it’s been a good second job,” he said.

Eventually, he said he would love to set up a program that would allow valley school students to pick celestial bodies for the new telescope to zoom in on. The kids could send in their requests on a Monday and by Tuesday they could be looking at fresh images captured by the scope the night before, he said.

Gianoulakis also wants to open the observatory some day for stargazing events and small, guided tours of a dozen people or less — with the blessing of the Boy Scouts, of course.

“I don’t want this just to be for our club. I want everyone in the valley to be able to come see it,” he said. “Of course, at 10 people at a time, that might take a while. But it’s a start.”

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean