Iowa State is the headquarters of a collaborative program that connects astronomers around the world who are continuing in their efforts to map the sky.

Steven Kawaler, the program’s director, said the goal of the Whole Earth Telescope program is “to look for stars in relatively empty fields within the Milky Way galaxy on either side of the zodiac and outside the Milky Way band.”

The collaborative WET program was founded in 1986 by the astronomy department at the University of Texas-Austin. The headquarters were relocated to Ames in 1997 after the retirement of its founder, Edward Nather.

“The program consists of 50 people in collaboration,” said Kawaler, professor of physics and astronomy. “Seven of those 50 people form a council known as the Council of the Wise.

They look over the one-page proposals, sent to them by astronomers, and decide which stars to study.”

As each astronomer finishes his or her shift with the telescope, the data collected is sent back to the headquarters at Iowa State to be compiled and organized.

At any given time, Kawaler said, at least two astronomers are focused on the stars as backups for each other.

“You want to build up enough sites to continuously look at the pulsating stars because the weather and the location of the telescope could interfere with data gathering,” said Reed Riddle, assistant director for the program’s operations.

Riddle said it is important to watch the stars at all times.

“The pulsations [of the stars] are like a music track,” he said. “If you’re not looking at [the stars] continuously, turning the telescope on and off like a radio can interfere with data gathering because it adds its own period or effects.”

WET became a subdivision of the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics in 1995. Last year, the program was granted a yearly $700,000 for three years from the National Science Foundation.

They mostly study white dwarf stars, Kawaler said, which are stars in their final growth stage, or the cooling process.

“It takes nine or 10 billion years from a star’s birth before it becomes a white dwarf,” he said.

He added that when a star becomes a white dwarf, it shrinks in size to about the size of the earth. The change in size would be comparable to a bowling ball shrinking to the size of a BB.

Twice a year, members of the program hold a workshop for astronomers to gather and compare data.

The next workshop will be in November over Thanksgiving break, Kawaler said.

However, the next conference will add an international twist.

“This workshop will be an experimental one because it will run for four weeks instead of two,” he said. “Normally, the whole workshop is held in one country. This one will be split between two countries. We’ll do two weeks in Ames and then two weeks in Toulouse [France].”