Posts Tagged ‘History’
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…
Read MoreFrom 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…
Read MoreFrom 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…
Read MoreDudley’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…
Read MoreFrom 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. …
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreFrom 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…
Read MoreFrom the Library: “Radial Velocity of the Andromeda Nebula”
If you were to list the great astronomers of the last century, just based on your own memory, it’s a safe bet that Vesto Slipher would not be a name you come up with. Vesto Melvin Slipher, “V.M.” to most folks, was the head astronomer at Lowell Observatory for over fifty years. If he is…
Read MoreUnprofessional Science
In a previous post, I mention the “professionalization of science,” a cultural shift in which Dudley had a part to play. It immediately raises the question, what exactly does “un-professional science” look like? What came before? We actually have a good example here in the Capitol Region. Most readers will know of the Albany Institute…
Read MoreHarry Raymond (1876-1961)
A great “thank you” to Dorothy Matsui of Redmond, WA, for finding us and sending us material from her grandfather, Harry Raymond. Raymond was an astronomer for Dudley from 1905 until 1939, meaning his career spans the creation of the General Catalog. Raymond’s memoirs will hopefully fill in some of the gaps in our understanding…
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