Fenton Hill is in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, about 35 miles west of Los Alamos. It is at an altitude of 8680 feet, relatively dry, and very dark. There is no line of sight to any city. Between Fenton Hill and Los Alamos are the peaks of the Valle Caldera, most over 10000 feet. Sandia Crest, the mountain overlooking Albuquerque, is visible from Fenton Hill, some 60 miles away.
There is a good quality paved road to the edge of the site (an hour's travel from Los Alamos), and graded roads within the site. The developed area consists of about 30 acres, fairly flat, part of a triangular thinly forested ridge about half a mile wide at its base and extending to the southwest a distance of about 3 miles. Los Alamos National Laboratory has a long-term use agreement with the Forest Service for the developed 30 acres, and could potentially acquire the rights to use some other portions of the ridge, which has a graded Forest Service road along its length.
The developed site has power, water, phone, and a T1 communications link to Los Alamos. There are several buildings, including conference rooms, a very well equipped machine shop, a heavy equipment shop, a warehouse, dormitory trailers and data acquisition trailers. In addition there are some towers that might be useful for instrument platforms.
The site was used for many years by the Los Alamos project in geothermal energy known as Hot Dry Rock. Very deep wells conducted water down to a source of heat, through it, and then back up to the surface for a significant energy gain. The heated water was then passed to heat exchangers for the extraction of power. Evidently the project was successful enough that the Department of Energy considered it ripe for transfer to commercial outfits, and asked Los Alamos to terminate the project in late 1995. The site would either be decommissioned and returned to the Forest Service in pristine condition, or turned over to other users.
A number of potential users of the site at Los Alamos met in late 1995 to propose making Fenton Hill into a research station for astronomy, geosciences, and educational outreach programs. We formed a Fenton Hill Observatory steering committee, and solicited ideas from Los Alamos staff and potential outside users on how best to make use of the site. The Los Alamos branch of the UC Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (INPAC) championed the cause of Fenton Hill Observatory and began a campaign of obtaining outside interest in the site, astronomical instruments for installation there, and funding for the use of the site. An early success was the proposal to the University of California Office of the President for the REACT telescope, an automated, robotic telescope for education and research purposes, which was funded in July 1996.
Fenton Hill Observatory has run a highly successful Earthwatch Student Challenge Awards Program, funded by the Durfee Foundation, with eight highly talented high school students from all over the country in which we used portable telescopes, CCD cameras and computers to determine some of the astronomical characteristics of the Fenton Hill site and other potential sites in the Jemez Mountains, such as Pajarito Peak, on Zia Pueblo land. This program has run for 5 summers so far, 1997 - 2001. Many alumni of this Earthwatch campaign have returned to Los Alamos as undergraduate research students.
The first astronomy project at Fenton Hill actually predates the concept of Fenton Hill Observatory. This is the Milagro gamma-ray telescope, presently under construction in a 5-million gallon pond used by the Hot Dry Rock project in its early days. The second, much smaller in scale, is a 50 mm drift-scan camera sited on the roof of one of the trailers, which we installed one evening in December 1995, courtesy of the TASS project.
In the spring of 1998 we installed a concrete pad for the first permanent optical telescope, namely REACT, on Fenton Hill. In the fall of 2000 we built concrete pads for the University of Puerto Rico interferometer, and the following spring constructed its beam combining room. At about the same time we completed a new enclosure for REACT and the 30" telescope which arrived from Berkeley at the end of the summer of 2001. In fall 2001 we built a large concrete pad to support the telescopes of the RAPTOR project in optical transient detection.
