http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Astronomer_statue_at_Questacon_(453725975).jpg

There is another sculpture made of shattered glass which I haven’t been able to track down (largely because I didn’t put in much effort). I get the impression that the volume of glass requires something much larger than the 26″ lens, so that sculpture may be from one of the large reflecting telescopes.

So why is the declination ring off by 10′? Is that just an error in ruling the ring or has the foundation shifted? (Or other reasons – like it was never put on right to begin with.)

I still fondly remember struggling to find the target stars from the 3×4 cards in the little wooden box we had to work from. Nowadays I have my Mac with Starry Night Pro to hand and have an advantage. Rob Capon (who graciously has funded much of the Observatory’s restoration) and I determined a couple years ago that the dec readings were off by 10′ of arc to the South. This is probably why I had such a devil of a time finding the targets in the finder years ago.

These days I make presentations to Girl Scouts and other groups at McCormick and have found that that is about as much fun as one can have (in addition to showing them things through the Clark refractor and my own scope) and not get arrested! There’s something just soooo cool about hand slewing that scope, I just can’t describe it! I’ve never flipped the tube over & looked at the objective. I understand that there are bubbles in the glass… Great catch, great story!

Hopefully the whole declination situation will be resolved this summer as digital encoders & a readout are to be installed. This’ll make the operation so easy a caveman could do it!

I hope that scope remains in use for another few hundred years!
Long live LMO!

I LOVE hearing McCormick stories! Also, Larry Fredrick is still in the dept (retired, though.). He was introduced last night as the 4th and final director of the observatory, because subsequent department chairs didn’t want their portraits on the wall!

@MadScientist: Mt. Stromlo’s refractor was indeed the “sister scope” to McCormick!

I am one of the very few people who have taken plates with both the McCormick and the Yale Columbia telescopes. I know for certain of two others. I worked as an observer in the McCormick parallax program from roughly the fall of 1972 to the fall of 1979. (So I have spent many more cold winter nights in the McCormick dome than Phil has.) I was sent to Mt. Stromlo in both 1976 and 1977 to take plates for the Southern parallax program of Phil Ianna, at UVA at that time.

It was a very bad day for me when I heard about the fire at Mt. Stromlo.

When Phil mentioned “long cold nights at the eyepiece”, that, while thinking about my observing, triggered a very scary memory at the eyepiece for me. It was a December or January night. I had just located a program star in the finder eyepiece. When I started looking through the 26 inch to position the program star for the plates I would take, I noticed that the stars looked weird through the 26 inch, but not through the finder. After thinking for a bit, I “flipped” the telescope, something we did not like to do, so I could look at the objective. When I saw the objective, I could see that there was some water in between the two lens elements. On a cold winter’s night, that is scary!

I called the director, Larry Fredrick, and he called our instrument maker. They both came to the dome and the solution for the night was to shine some hot bright lights on the objective and wrap things in blankets for insulation. The next day the objective was disassembled and cleaned.

George