The Badlands Observatory in Quinn, South Dakota, is
built on the site of an old hospital
Image courtesy of Ron Dyvig
Eighty-four miles east of Mount Rushmore, the town of Quinn, South Dakota, blends unobtrusively into the outskirts of arid Badlands National Park. With a population of just 44, it would be easy for passing tourists to completely miss the town’s existence—if it weren’t for the incongruous, futuristic white dome peeking through the trees along Highway 14.
Standing inside the 20-foot-high squared-off base beneath the dome, Ron Dyvig prepares for his nightly observation session by pressing a large green button on the wall. Gears hum and the dome’s lid retracts, exposing the 26-inch telescope inside to the cool night sky. Dyvig then escapes to the heated downstairs control room, pulls his chair up to the computer, and starts typing instructions to the telescope. An overhead assemblage of motors, which he obtained from a defunct vending-machine company, whirs to life in response to his commands. He gives a satisfied grin as the dome’s opening begins to pivot, moving in line with the mirror of the telescope as it scans the darkness.
“I’ve loved this stuff ever since the leader of my Boy Scout troop showed me how to find Mars in the sky,” Dyvig says. He joined the local Black Hills Astronomical Society while still in high school in 1957 and became its president a few years later, before seizing on the chance to work with professional astronomers when he took a job at the University of Arizona as a research technician developing imaging devices for telescopes in 1968.
Dyvig left the university in 1972 for a variety of day jobs, including running an aerial photography company and working at a car dealership, but as the years went by, Dyvig nursed the dream of owning his own observatory capable of professional-grade work. He kept an eye out for a good site to build his dream, finally finding it in 1998 in a run-down hospital building being sold cheaply in Quinn. With $25,000, help from volunteers, donations of equipment—and despite a fire that nearly destroyed the observatory while it was under construction—“first light” (the first time a telescope is used to make an astronomical observation) was achieved in early 2000. Now as he settles down in front of the computer, watching images of the sky build up on the screen, Dyvig slides naturally into his identity as one of the world’s leading asteroid hunters—as someone who, just maybe, could help save the planet.
Tonight the hunt is going nowhere; Quinn’s night skies, often inky black, are crowded with opaque clouds. Other nights, though, Dyvig has repeatedly found his target. In the seven years since he built his Badlands Observatory, he has sighted 25 previously undiscovered asteroids, ranging from hundreds to thousands of feet wide—the largest is estimated to be between two and four miles in diameter and is officially known as 63528. As the discoverer, Dyvig can suggest a more euphonious official name, but so far he has named only one of his discoveries: 26715, a two-mile-wide rock now known as South Dakota. Since his facility boasts one of the most powerful privately owned telescopes in the country, he has also worked with NASA on projects like tracking the orbits of hundreds of faintly visible known asteroids to determine whether they are on a collision course with Earth. “This observatory is kind of a throwback,” he says. “In the 19th century and before, amateur astronomers did a lot of the observation.” As telescopes grew steadily bigger and more expensive, the work increasingly became concentrated in institutional observatories tended by professional astronomers. The amateurs “were relegated to the hobby role for a hundred years. But now, with a backyard telescope and a computer, you can do research-grade work,” Dyvig adds.
Dyvig is part of a growing corps of amateurs at the forefront of America’s efforts to identify, detect, and track potentially hazardous asteroids. NASA’s Spaceguard survey program, established in 1998, aims to locate and follow at least 90 percent of the estimated 1,100 asteroids that come within about 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit around the sun and that are larger than two-thirds of a mile wide. So far, about 75 percent of these objects have been discovered, but the remaining 25 percent are dim and proving difficult to find.
