The All-Cut Come-It

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 discovered by Dr. Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters, known as C.H.F. Peters for obvious reasons. In the…

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Counting Questions: Dudley Observatory FAQ

To 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. During the sixties and the space race, Dudley Observatory shifted away from astronomical observation and…

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From the Collection: the Pruyn Brashear Equatorial Telescope

With 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 use without a telescope. The Pruyn is a refracting telescope, which means it is exactly…

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One, Two, Three ..

… 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 Observatory.  Here’s a nutshell version:  Dudley is an observatory founded in the 1850s here in…

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From the Collection: Dopplemayer’s “Atlas novus coelesti”

The 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 the 2nd century BCE. During the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists and illustrators in Europe…

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Dudley’s Female Computers

Dudley 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 saved the astronomical materials they were working with, but not always the bits and pieces…

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From the Collection: Gemini S-10 Particle Collector

Few 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 particle collectors and looking through electron microscopes is a story that deserves its own post. …

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STEM Education for the Young to the Young-at-heart

Our 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 bacon isn’t going to kill you.

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The Battle of the Board

It’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 of the story is that a split occurred on the board not long after Dudley…

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From the Collection: Groundbreaking Soil

As 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 stymied when I see a glass box full of dirt. This mix of greyish soil…

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