Voices of TaosDr. Colin Nicholls on how he fell in love with the night sky and his hopes for the new UNM-Taos Cielo Centro Observatory
This week Voices of Taos producer Laura Martin Baseman interviews Dr. Colin Nicholls, professor at UNM-Taos. Laura and Colin discuss General Obligation Bond 3, which passed on November 5th and allocates 1.5 million dollars to the UNM-Taos Space STEM Center. This will help pay for the Cielo Centro Observatory that Colin has been actively working on. The observatory will house a thirty-six-inch diameter telescope, making it the largest publicly accessible telescope in the region. Colin tells us how he fell in love with the night sky as a child, remembering asking his parents’ permission to get up at 3am to watch the 1966 Leonid meteor shower. Finally, Laura and Colin talk about how important it is to preserve Taos' night skies for cultural as well as scientific reasons.
