Eyes on the skies: new telescope is awesome.

Summer is sky-watching time for many families, when you can stay up later to see the stars. It's also going to be a big season for astronomers at Michigan State University, who are getting a great view of the night sky thanks to a new super-powerful telescope that MSU helped build in the Andes mountains of Chile. The SOAR telescope, which stands for the Southern Astrophysical Research telescope, was built through a partnership of astronomy groups and U.S. universities. MSU will contribute a special camera, called the Spartan camera, which will be installed on the telescope later this year. The camera will take infrared pictures, or pictures that show heat radiation, which lets astronomers look deep inside dark, dusty gas clouds in space. The camera will also let researchers see some of the most distant objects in the universe.

The camera, designed and built at MSU, cost about $1.6 million. MSU will have control of the telescope 40 nights a year. SOAR began giving scientists pictures from the night sky last month.

Astronomers at MSU hope the new telescope partnership will help get college students and young people visiting MSU excited about astronomy.

MSU has a control room on the first floor of the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building, where researchers will be looking at the images from SOAR sent to their computers from Chile. There is a wall of glass windows so people passing by can see the astronomers and astronomy students at work.

At the nearby Abrams Planetarium on campus, there will also be a station for visitors to see what's going on in the control room.

A powerful telescope like this one is reason to celebrate.

On April 17, the day the telescope was dedicated in Chile, MSU had a little party. "It was a very exciting day," says Wolfgang Bauer, a professor of physics and the chairman of MSU's Department of Physics and Astronomy.