Laurie Hatch

Claire Max stands next to the 3-metre telescope at California's Lick Observatory.

On clear, moonless evenings, most of the biggest optical telescopes around the world begin the night's observations by firing a golden laser beam at the sky.

Claire Max does not like to take credit for this astronomical light show, even though the lasers' widespread use is a tribute to her three-decade campaign to perfect and promote them an effort that was recognized on 16 January when the American Astronomical Society awarded her its 2015 instrumentation prize. For Max, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, self-aggrandizement would be unbusinesslike. And she is all business; even her way of speaking is careful, like someone who feels obliged to stand behind every word she says. Her passion is reserved for the technology itself. I still get gripped by it, she says, showing off photograph after photograph of telescopes, lasers and thin beams of light shining upwards as straight as a ruler.

The lasers, Max explains, are a crucial element of the telescopes' adaptive optics, which correct for turbulence in the atmosphere. Without adaptive optics, stars and galaxies viewed at high magnification will dance, distort and blur like stones seen at the bottom of a stream. With adaptive optics, they will remain steady and sharp, allowing telescopes on the ground to routinely equal or exceed the clarity obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This capability has allowed current-generation telescopes to carry out high-resolution studies of objects ranging from moons in the outer Solar System to stars at the centre of the Milky Way. And now it is enabling the construction of telescopes measuring 2040 metres across, as much as four times the diameter and 16 times the light-gathering power of any now in existence.

Max has been involved in this development from its early days: from the first demonstration of laser-assisted adaptive optics to building the prototype and then establishing a centre that spread the technology to telescopes around the world.

Yet Max's greatest triumph has also become her greatest challenge. Last October, at an age when other astronomers might be looking forward to retirement, the 68-year-old Max agreed to serve as interim director of the University of California Observatories (UCO) the organization responsible for all the astronomical hardware owned by one of the biggest state university systems in the United States. And in that role, 'interim' or not, Max finds herself navigating the professional and cultural chaos in astronomy being triggered by the cost of these next-generation behemoths.

There are three of these telescopes in various stages of planning and construction, each with a price tag in the order of US$1 billion. That cost, says Max, poses a quandary for their owners and funders among them the UCO, a key partner in the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) that started construction last year atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. How do they pay for all their older, smaller telescopes? Should the owners give in to financial pressure and close the facilities even though the telescopes are still essential workhorses for individual researchers and training grounds for young astronomers? Or should they fight to find creative ways to keep all the doors open?

Max's instinct is to fight using her unique combination of warmth, empathy and determination. So far, she is winning. After three decades of persuasion and consensus-building in pursuit of adaptive optics, says Andrea Ghez, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, Max has developed a sure instinct for making connections among engineers, academics, funding officers, university administrators and all the others who have a say in telescope decisions.

These are powerful players, says Ghez gorillas at the table who'd like you for lunch. And to deal with them, she says, you need someone like Max: a gorilla with finesse.

Continued here:

Astronomy: Laser focus