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Dr. Jeff Hall
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Dr. Jeff Hall Astronomer, Director, Lowell Observatory
TRANSCRIPT:
About 20 years ago, the staff, the executives, the trustee of Lowell Observatory made a decision that we would remain a research institution, an active research institution. To do that, we need access to good, modern telescopic equipment. One of Lowell's strengths is that we own all of our own instruments. But our largest current telescope has an aperture of only 1.8 meters, meaning mirrors about 6 feet across.
As long as I've been at Lowell, we've been talking about a 4-meter class telescope. It was originally called the NGLT, the Next Generation Lowell Telescope. In 2002, John Hendricks, founder of Discovery Communications and who has long been a member of our trustee's advisory board, proposed that this facility be named the Discovery Channel Telescope, that Discovery would contribute substantially to the capital cost in return for naming rights and first rights to the visual products from the telescope.
They don't want to dictate the kind of research that we do; they want to use the images in their programming. It's a wonderful partnership that is perfect for this institution, with a founder who was also passionately dedicated to communicating what astronomers do to the public.
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