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Erickson helps humans see into heavens Helicopter will help install telescope array at Mount Wilson By DAVID PRESZLER A Rogue Valley company will play a part in a historic astronomy project this morning. Erickson Air-Crane of Central Point will place six telescope enclosures -- each weighing about 7 tons -- at Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena, Calif. The array of telescopes, scheduled to be operational in January 2000, is expected to produce the sharpest picture of the stars ever achieved -- images up to 100 times clearer than those provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. The resolution will be sharp enough to see a nickel from 10,000 miles. The project is being conducted by Georgia State University's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) and is known as the CHARA array. "If you put a baseball stadium on the moon, with the CHARA array you could tell who was pitching and who was at bat," Dr. Harold McAlister, CHARA's director, says in a news release posted on the project's Web site (www.chara.gsu.edu). "We'll be able to see things we've only been able to imagine before. We can't really anticipate all the things this array will let us do." "We're obviously excited to be involved with this project," says Erickson Air-Crane's Jeff Stein. "The information that they'll gain once this unit is operating will be quite significant in the scientific community." Though the job may attract more attention, Stein says it's no more complicated than Erickson's typical lift-and-place tasks. "It's not unlike any of our other heavy lifting jobs," he says. "It's a little more high-profile than placing an air conditioner, but it's fairly regular from our standpoint. It's something we do every day." Weather permitting, an Erickson S-64E Air-crane will lift and place the enclosures in a Y-shaped pattern. The helicopter will transport the concrete domes, which are 18 feet in diameter and vary in height from 28 to 45 feet, less than a mile. The job is scheduled to start at 8 a.m. and take about 90 minutes. Two of the six telescopes are scheduled to come on line in June with the other four to be ready by the end of the year, according to Georgia State. The $13 million project is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and the university. The project uses a cutting-edge system of telescopes called interferometry. It uses the same interference patterns of light waves that produce the colors in oil slicks. Interferometry works somewhat like a magnifying glass that sharpens images by adding up and subtracting light waves. The system will gather light from the six one-meter telescopes and send the information through vacuum tubes to a central facility with the resulting patterns producing an image. A traditional telescope would have to be 1,800 feet in diameter to produce an equivalent image. The Mount Wilson Observatory is one of the world's top astronomical centers and was the site from which Edwin Hubble discovered that in the 1920s the Milky Way was not the only galaxy in the universe. The lift isn't the first time Erickson has been contracted for a high-profile job. In 1993, the federal government hired the company to remove and replace the Freedom Statue atop the U.S. Capitol dome in Washington. (The Los Angeles Times contributed to this story.) Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA