Dr. Rapson put together this display in our Planetarium Gallery. That’s the Dudley’s Comet Seeker telescope, built by Alvan Clark & Co., along with articles from the Astronomical Journal detailing the two comets that the telescope discovered. The first was…
Read MoreTo start off, I thought I would use this space to answer some of the most common questions that I receive on the exhibit floor: Where is the Observatory? Funny story about that. We’re actually an observatory without an observatory.…
Read MoreWith the recent announcement that Dudley will be building an observatory, it seems like a good time to introduce the piece that will be at the heart of that observatory: the Pruyn Brashear Equitorial. After all, an observatory isn’t much…
Read More… gosh, there are a lot of them, aren’t there? Welcome to Counting Stars, a repository for writings on the history of and around the Dudley Observatory. Those of you joining us from Facebook or All Over Albany may be unfamiliar with the Dudley…
Read MoreThe night sky has always been a source of inspiration for art that borders on science (or maybe the other way around). Examples are as ancient as the Dunhuang Star Chart, from the Tang Dynsaty in China (618–907), and the Farnese Atlas from…
Read MoreDudley Observatory has spent most of its 160 years as a working science institution, and not a museum. That means that its employees weren’t always focused on saving the kind of materials that a museum would preserve. Of course, they…
Read MoreFew pieces in our collection have traveled as far as this one, or seen quite so much. This is the S-10 Particle Collector, from the Gemini space program. How Dudley went from building observatories and looking through telescopes to building…
Read MoreOur high flying outreach astronomer Dr. Valerie Rapson recently gave a Tedx Talk in Albany about the need for continuing education in the STEM fields, the ways in which we can keep adults involved in lifelong scientific learning and why…
Read MoreIt’s an unfortunate fact that the Dudley Observatory, no matter what it has accomplished and no matter what it may accomplish, will always best be known to historians for its near collapse just as it got started. The simple version…
Read MoreAs a museum worker, it’s always nice to have things in your collection that are a little unconventional. Books and artworks are great, but there’s something fun about having a few taxidermied animals and Victorian hair catchers. Still, even I’m…
Read More
