West Coast Astronomy

“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race . . .” The tanned, eager faces of a table-full of Canadian climbers looked up at me, bemused but amused, as I launched into addressing a haggis which had taken two days to track down in deepest British Columbia. I’m no great Burns expert, but it was the 25th of January 2003 and our friend and host the astronomer / mountaineer / paraglider Sean Dougherty was keen to give his Penticton friends a taste of Scottish culture. It was a great Saturday evening, following a fine day of sunlit skiing on Apex Mountain – an appropriately auspicious start to what turned out to be a rewarding 6-month sabbatical on the west coast of Canada.

Although a career in astronomy involves a lot of travel – often to remote mountain observatories – this was the first time that we had pulled off the somewhat tricky feat of organizing an extended trip abroad for the whole family. My wife Fiona had managed to arrange a 6-month break in her medical career, while I had secured a Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) Senior Fellowship that excused me from my normal lecturing commitments at Edinburgh University. Finding ourselves freed from everyday workplace ties, we reckoned our three young children would only benefit from 6 months in a different environment, so off we went! Well, sort of. Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple, and our trip would never have been possible without the generous hospitality and support of my colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and at the Hertzberg Institute for Astrophysics in Victoria and Penticton. Moreover our transition into Vancouver life was made all the smoother and more pleasurable by the fantastic welcome given to our two daughters by the Bayview Community School. This remarkably relaxed, open and inventive institution provided our eldest daughter in particular with an experience she will never forget.

What did we learn from our time in British Columbia? Our daughters learned to ski, Fiona learned about sea kayaking, we became expert at cooking on the barbecue, and I found a city whose appetite for quality coffee matched my own.

Professionally, I learned that life as an astronomer in Canada is more different than I had expected from my own experience in the UK. Canada is obviously an enormous country but still has a relatively small population. Consequently, the academic community is small and scattered. Even at a major institution such as the University of British Columbia I found the astronomy group to consist of a rather disparate group of (albeit very talented) individuals. A Canadian astronomer’s main collaborator is not generally to be found “down the corridor” but in some other often distant location in North America or Europe. This contrasts with the situation in the UK, and especially in major astronomical centres such as Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh, where coherent research groups have been built up over the years, capable of establishing international leadership in major areas of astronomical research. The plus side of this situation is that I found Canadian astronomers keen to establish collaborations with my research group in Edinburgh, and eager to make invaluable contributions to major Edinburgh-led projects. Two such collaborative projects are now underway, using UK/Canadian shared telescope facilities in Hawaii, and several of my Canadian-based colleagues will be attending a meeting at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in October of this year.

While based in Vancouver, I travelled down to Chile to take part in one of the first observing runs with the new Gemini South Telescope. This 8-m diameter telescope high in the Chilean Andes is another example of a successful scientific partnership between Canada and the UK, and the Scottish connection was once again in evidence: the instrument we were using had been constructed at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, and the telescope director, Phil Puxley, has been a good friend since we first met as postgraduate students at Edinburgh University in the mid 1980s.

Leaving Vancouver wasn’t easy. The west coast of Canada is an easy place for a Scot to feel at home. Many people were eager to talk of their Scottish connections and the scenery is like a scaled up version of the Scottish highlands. However, perhaps the most impressive thing about Vancouver is how universally positive its residents are about their city. Arguably this is easy in a city surrounded by snow-capped mountains, often under cloudless skies, but I’m sure we home-based Scots could benefit from a bit more of this attitude. Certainly, in the field of modern Astronomy, Scotland can hold its head high; and a gloriously sunny camping weekend at Achiltibuie in late August reminded me that, here in Scotland, we have scenery to rival anything I saw on our travels on the Canadian and South American Pacific coastline.