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who thought we should make good use of the opportunity to learn to do
astrophysics, while at the same time attending to its associated technology;
others, however, thought it better not to waste time and resources in developing local technology, but instead concentrate on doing science, and leave the
boring and costly business of instrumentation to the telescope owners. We
held a meeting to vote on which direction to take (our way of doing things at
the time). Those of us who held that it was worthwhile acclimatizing this type
of technology in Spain won the vote. This provided us with comprehensible
arguments to put to the politicians in order to get the funding needed to
proceed.
Rather than weary the reader with a list of ‘gadgets’ that we have been
developing and fabricating up to the present time, I shall simply mention
those that were most significant for their difficulty, or for their scientific or
technical consequences.
Perhaps the first complex technological project undertaken by the IAC was
the instrument we referred to as the ‘automatic multichannel telescope for
photometry and polarimetry of the zodiacal light and other diffuse sources’.
This instrument was a six-channel spectrophotometer that had been devised
in the early seventies; it crystallized as a consequence of a research grant that
we had obtained for this purpose from the IBM Fund of the Computer Centre
of the Complutense University of Madrid. Its development suffered from
scant manpower resources and a strong limitation on funding. We obtained
small grants from the Juan March Foundation and the National Commission
of Space Research (CONIE, after its Spanish initials). We commissioned the
mechanics and optics from REOSC (France), but the electronics and software
were developed in Spain.
I remember an incident that introduced us to the fierce competition
among large companies and their underhand practices. We had to acknowledge that a computer would be needed to govern the automation of the
instrument and, on the advice of the Nuclear Energy Council (JEN), we
chose NOVA, rather than Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, or IBM—the
favoured brands of the moment. We chose NOVA for its advanced configuration and because it was half the cost of the equivalent machines of the other
companies. Hewlett Packard mounted a campaign of denigration that obliged
us to challenge them to demonstrate before the Academy of Sciences that the
NOVA did not suit our purposes, as they had been broadcasting. In the face
of this public challenge, the Director General of the company ended up apologizing to our JEN assessors and came to the Canaries to apologize to me in
person while at the same time using the opportunity to advertise his company’s products.
17 Astronomical Instrumentation, Technology Transfer…
who thought we should make good use of the opportunity to learn to do
astrophysics, while at the same time attending to its associated technology;
others, however, thought it better not to waste time and resources in developing local technology, but instead concentrate on doing science, and leave the
boring and costly business of instrumentation to the telescope owners. We
held a meeting to vote on which direction to take (our way of doing things at
the time). Those of us who held that it was worthwhile acclimatizing this type
of technology in Spain won the vote. This provided us with comprehensible
arguments to put to the politicians in order to get the funding needed to
proceed.
Rather than weary the reader with a list of ‘gadgets’ that we have been
developing and fabricating up to the present time, I shall simply mention
those that were most significant for their difficulty, or for their scientific or
technical consequences.
Perhaps the first complex technological project undertaken by the IAC was
the instrument we referred to as the ‘automatic multichannel telescope for
photometry and polarimetry of the zodiacal light and other diffuse sources’.
This instrument was a six-channel spectrophotometer that had been devised
in the early seventies; it crystallized as a consequence of a research grant that
we had obtained for this purpose from the IBM Fund of the Computer Centre
of the Complutense University of Madrid. Its development suffered from
scant manpower resources and a strong limitation on funding. We obtained
small grants from the Juan March Foundation and the National Commission
of Space Research (CONIE, after its Spanish initials). We commissioned the
mechanics and optics from REOSC (France), but the electronics and software
were developed in Spain.
I remember an incident that introduced us to the fierce competition
among large companies and their underhand practices. We had to acknowledge that a computer would be needed to govern the automation of the
instrument and, on the advice of the Nuclear Energy Council (JEN), we
chose NOVA, rather than Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, or IBM—the
favoured brands of the moment. We chose NOVA for its advanced configuration and because it was half the cost of the equivalent machines of the other
companies. Hewlett Packard mounted a campaign of denigration that obliged
us to challenge them to demonstrate before the Academy of Sciences that the
NOVA did not suit our purposes, as they had been broadcasting. In the face
of this public challenge, the Director General of the company ended up apologizing to our JEN assessors and came to the Canaries to apologize to me in
person while at the same time using the opportunity to advertise his company’s products.
17 Astronomical Instrumentation, Technology Transfer…