If such an EPO Consortium could be founded (I hereby nominate you & Phil to the advisory board) perhaps such an august (september?) organization could inveigh on the Register’s sensibilities to allow observatories to be on the list without being hamstrung…

I have also visited the even-older Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and I’ve been involved in their educational outreach efforts. It is another inspiring place to visit, and I encourage you to make that trek if you haven’t already.

I think you would be as mortified as me (and many other astronomers) if any of these cultural icons were ever bulldozed or otherwise made inaccessible. I wonder if Yerkes, Lick, Mt. Wilson, and other historic observatories could form an educational outreach consortium that would help ensure each others future (rather than each of them fending off developers, etc, for themselves)?

Our speaker was Dr. Mark Whittle (Phil, he sends his fond regards!) who explained that the WMAP image of the CMB (which is is basically a microscopic (you read that right: MICROscopic) view of the universe’s quantum state graininess (at the beginning of the inflationary period) when it was the size of a bacterium! So the 27 Billion Light Year wide CMB (13.5 billion LY to the left & 13.5 billion LY to the right = 27 billion LY diameter) is an imprint of a bacterium sized universe!

And all us BA Blogees where right there, melted into pure energy and stuff…

Dr. Whittle got a long ovation at the end of his talk.

The telescope is open to the public on the 1st & 3rd Fridays of each month for “Public Night” observing. On the 2nd & 4th Fridays we at CAS operate the scope for “Group Night” where Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, school groups and such can observe through the scope.

We do a PowerPoint presentation in the attached classroom and the kids can touch a fragment of the Barringer Meteor Crater meteorite. If it’s clear the dome is opened up and we observer what targets of opportunity present themselves. If it’s cloudy the scope itself is rather extremely cool.

I guy I used to work with was once called to NASA on an engineering issue. While at the VAB he was invited up into the service scaffolds of the space shuttle Challenger. His host encouraged him to go ahead and touch the tiles with his bare hands, which he did with some enthusiasm. The Challenger was at that time being prepped for its last flight. He touched the shuttle, and it blew up. Coincidence? YOU DECIDE.

Oh, and touching? Yeah, I know what you mean. It was all I could do to not touch Endeavour when I got a tour. But somehow I thought it best not to mess with it. And I hope the link doesn’t get me all moderated and stuff.

I touched a meteorite once, in a museum
I thought, Wow, this is big and weird, gee, um
To the touch it was cold
And it felt very old
Learning they fly makes want to so see em

Because there are so many touch receptors in our fingertips it makes sense that by touching something we might expect to be more closely connected to it. Even to the extent of leaving something behind or taking something away. Silly idea. But comforting and connecting. Silly idea though.

I just looked over at a photo of my two grandsons and winked at them, causing me to wonder if there is a connection between the touch and the wink.

As Diana Troy once said in a similar situation: “Would you three like to be alone?”

(Plus, as we came out of the Dome, it started snowing. My first snowfall!)

In your place, I’d have touched the glass too (as would the other posters here it seems). In 2000 I visited the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. There I had a chance to see dinosaur fossils still embedded in the strata. I was unable to resist reaching out and touching the leg bone of some long gone giant, and in doing that my mind was transported to a different time and world. I stood there with my eyes closed for over a minute imagining…and it gave me goosebumps. Powerful experience indeed.

I get the same feeling when my Dad lets me hold one of his NASA artifacts — especially the flighted souvenirs he was given through his years there. Mystical, no, powerful, yes.

I would like to go on a weekend but if the tour is the same as what I saw then I will pass.

I also have similar feelings when visiting any significant historical monument or place.

There’s a third: Lowell is also where VM Slipher made his first spectrograms of nebulae, which indicated immediately that they, as a class of objects, had a tendency to be receding from us. This was a major discovery all by itself; Hubble’s big step was to discover Cepheids in M31, allowing for a standard distance/redshift to be established.

Once when I was doing research at Lowell, I was allowed to hold some of VM’s glass spectrograms and contemplate their role in history. You’re right: Lowell is, in its historical way, cooler than Kitt Peak.

…the Pluto formerly known as planet.

Even though it’s far older, Lowell is much the cooler trip, for a couple of historical reasons:

First, it was founded by Percival Lowell, the main proponent (and maybe original proponent, although I don’t remember for sure) of the ‘canals on Mars’ hypothesis.

Second, Lowell Observatory was the site where Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet formerly known as Pluto. Sadly, that scope is not open for tours, but you can walk around the outside of the dome, where there’s a plaque commemorating the discovery of Pluto.

And BA, I visited the observatory last summer and got a photo of Bad Astronomy next to that plaque, but all I had was my cell phone camera and it didn’t turn out well. At all. Next time I go, I’ll bring my real camera and see if I can do any better.