FOR RELEASE: February 1, 1971; FOR KEEPSIES: In Perpetuity
Do you ever set aside some papers, because you don’t need them right now, but they were maybe interesting for later? And then eventually there’s just a pile or folder or shelf devoted to these, because you’ve inadvertently started a collection? And then, half a century later, someone stumbles across these boxes and wonders, why?
Why do we have boxes of printed press releases from NASA in the early 1970s? Probably the same reason we have old math exams from the 1940s out at the Observatory. (That’s a post for another time!)
Honestly, if we’d been diligent about tidying this stuff, this blog would be way less interesting.
In our attempts to minimize the ever-growing aura of light pollution around the Observatory, we work to form good relationships with our neighbors. And to maintain them.
Back in 1979 – an excellent vintage! – the Keystone Water Company agreed to a switch controlling the light outside their standpipes, just south of the Observatory. For as long as we remain good stewards of the switch, always turning it back on when we’re done observing, they let us adjust the night sky’s brightness just a little bit more each night.
Your average TA for an Astronomy night lab is excited about their job. They not only took an Astronomy course, but liked it enough to come back. At night. Irregularly, as the weather permits, sometimes in the cold of a Pennsylvania winter. They’re enthusiastic about their job. We’re enthusiastic about them.
Good question!
So when you find notes from almost three decades ago with student gripes? Totally understand. We wish every student could bring the same excitement to a night with telescopes and stars.
And, for the record: Saturn absolutely is beautiful through a telescope on a night with no moon. Just phenomenal.
Some years ago, back in 1887, the University received a lovely Clark & Sons refracting telescope, complete with a clock drive to track the stars against the Earth’s rotation. When a shiny new toy scientific apparatus arrives on your doorstep, it’s very important to confirm that it works as intended. Here, in an old notebook, we see the original data on the clock drive’s variance from the ideal sidereal tracking rate.
It pays to be thorough.
“Observations for Determining Sidereal Clock’s Rate Nov. 8, 1889”
Then follows a table of stars with known right ascension and declination, then a repeated set of measurements 20 days later. “Rate of Loss per day .268 sec.” Considering the frequency with which proper polar alignment and tracking proves a nuisance more than a century later, that seems pretty good. The clock drive is long gone, of course, so we can only guess at how accurate it was and stayed throughout the decades.
It looks like these entries were by a J. D. Minick, Class of ’88. Best guess is a John David Minick, graduate of Bucknell in 1888, listed as Prof. John D. Minick of Lenoir, N.C. in the Memorials of Bucknell University, 1846 – 1896. Astronomer, apparently. Mathematician? Physicist? At this point, we’re content with the mystery.
Around the same time, Bucknell was also the home of one Jacob Henry Minick, Class of 1891. He’s listed in the link above as from Orrstown, PA, in Franklin County. Any relation?
“The Jacob H. Minick Fund was established by a bequest from Jacob H. Minick, Class of 1891, the income of which is to be given each year to students who, because of some physical difficulty, are forced to use crutches during all of their college work.”
As one would imagine, university buildings have tons of books in them. Shelves upon shelves, editions going back well over a century. See above, The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, 1887. Is it useful? Not particularly these days. Does it look cool on the shelf in line with year after year of its subsequent volumes? Of course!
Note the volume near the middle of the image, with the well-worn spine. It’s a duplicate of the book to the right, the 1922 edition, save for one key detail. A bookplate:
There’s a lot going on here.
Ex Libris Harry Scheidy Everett. Listed in L’Agenda 1925 as Associate Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy and Director of the Observatory, he was already a Bucknell alumnus, having received his Master of Arts on Wednesday, June 18th, 1913, according to the Bucknell Catalogue of 1912-13. (He also played the violoncello.)
Astronomy now lives under the Physics umbrella, rather than Mathematics, although we’re all stacked on top of each other here in Olin Science.
Have a look at that bookplate, and imagine that self-described philomath Dr. Everett was having a grand old time drawing that up. In case you can’t read it, the inscription above the doors reads: “Let none ignorant of Geometry enter here“
As we prepare for the next major solar eclipse in North America – mark your calendars for the 8th of April, 2024! – it’s fun to look back at Observatory records from previous eclipses. On May 10th, 1994, nearly 300 people congregated at the Observatory to take in the spectacle of a partial eclipse.
It’s worth noting that getting the full experience of totality requires a perfect combination of timing, location, and decent weather. Not simple.
This particular event was an annular eclipse, in which the moon’s apparent diameter was less than that of the sun, so that there was always a portion of the sun’s disc visible, creating an annulus (ring) when viewed along the path of greatest eclipse. Still amazing.
It’s not just telescopes at the Observatory. We also have a spyglass. What’s the difference?
There are a variety of potential optics for a telescope, using reflectors to reflect and focus light, using refractive lenses to bend and focus light, using mirrors to turn a beam around corners, using these in combination. Each has its pros and cons, and careful optical design and precise manufacturing work to gather lots of light, to provide good resolution and magnification, and to correct for optical aberrations.
And in doing all of that, the image reaching your eye or the camera sensor gets flipped upside down. Also in reverse, if you’ve got a mirror in your optical train. When looking at stars and deep sky objects, that’s not a big deal. “Up” is arbitrary in space. For terrestrial viewing, however, up matters. Seeing that incoming pirate ship upside down is disorienting. So a good spyglass keeps up as up.
1943!
It does so by using a Galilean refractor design, which has a concave lens in the optical assembly to avoid the upside-down flip. The resulting telescope is necessarily longer than a comparable refractor with convex lenses, and thus heavier. That weight tends to limit the possible objective aperture size, and the practical magnification limits are low. Still: very effective for spotting Edward Teach at a distance, or for identifying the four largest moons of Jupiter.
Binoculars, incidentally, manage to keep the world upright thanks to a set of prisms between the objective lenses and the eyepieces. Yet another handy trick in the optical design toolkit.
Not presented entirely without comment, as it’s hard to contain the urge toward snark. Yes, we know what this is and why it’s useful; yes, we know what they mean by “gender” and how F/F looks the same but changes things. Yes, yes.
At any rate: the cables which once needed this adapter are gone, as is the equipment it carried electronic messages to and from. Now we just have a block of metal and plastic and the opportunity to squint and say, “I’m not sure that’s how that’s supposed to work.”
In 1963, one could purchase a Standard Astro-Dome with a 17′ inside diameter for the low, low price of $14,667. It must have been a worthwhile investment, because we’re still using it 60+ years later with no plans to update or replace it anytime soon.
Among the stacks and stacks of old records and books at the Observatory, we have a substantial text discussing best practices for astrophotography from…
1895. Sweet.
You may read a scanned version online if so inclined. Fun to note that, broadly speaking, the difficulties remain. With every improvement in technology comes an increased ability to explore and a growing expectation of quality, so there’s always opportunity to do better. From page 2:
“In order to appreciate the accuracy with which the mechanical adjustments must be made, and the care with which they must be used, we should recollect that in a telescope of sixteen feet focal length, a second of arc is rather less than .001 of an inch, — a quantity quite invisible to the naked eye. We are required, therefore, to keep a mass of metal weighing several hundred pounds following the star with such accuracy, for perhaps an hour, that it shall not for any length of time shift to one side of the other from its true position by this amount.“
