Lowell Observatory

We visited the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff AZ in in September 2013. This observatory was the brainchild of Percival Lowell. He made his fortune from the cotton mills of Massachusetts that his family owned. He had a lifelong interest in astronomy and decided to pursue his interest in a big way. His goal was to have a first class private observatory at his disposal. Eventually Flagstaff was chosen for the site. Flagstaff is a high desert location (7,000 feet) and was remote from city lights in the 1890's when the observatory was established. Like many other successful observatories it has all of the right elements.

Lowell had a fascination with Mars and the large instrument that he commissioned was intended to study Mars with the goal of proving that there was intelligent life there. The centerpiece telescope of the observatory is a 24" refractor with an objective made by Alvan Clark. It was and is a first class instrument.

He became fixated on the idea that there were canals on Mars and that these canals showed that there was intelligent life that created them. He documented what he saw through hand drawings that were widely published. Later, while he was still alive, it was found that there aren't any canals. This was hard for him to swallow and Lowell and the Observatory had to contend with this mistake for many years.

Did he lie and fabricate the data? Today the best guess is that he really did see lines when he looked at Mars. These lines were the blood vessels in the back of his eye. A special eyepiece that he used on the telescope caused a magnified reflection of his retina and thus the canals of Mars were born.

In 1930 one of the Observatory's telescopes was used by Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto. Later, Vesto Slipher used the 24" telescope to discover that the universe isn't static but expanding. This discovery paved the way for modern cosmology.


Let's start with the 24" telescope.

	Yes, those are automobile wheels and tires. The dome rides on them as it rotates.
The pier is massive as you would expect it to be. The pier and mount for the Yerkes telescope at 39" isn't much bigger than those for this 24".	This is the observer chair. We had one like this at Johns Hopkins. It rolls up and down and around the dome so that the observer has a comfortable (more or less) position to look through the eyepiece wherever the telescope is pointed.

Let's go through some other parts of the observatory. Here's the current museum which, in earlier times, was the library. No, there's no telescope under that dome.



Calculations have always been an important part of astronomy and here are some examples of early devices for crunching numbers. I took these pictures with the idea of incorporating them into my talk on the history of computing. Alas, they never made it into the lecture.




Now we're taking a walk to see the Pluto telescope. I tried to get a good photo of the telescope itself but the image below is about the best one I got.

Let's wander around outside.
This is the bottom pier of a 16" f/3 research telescope. This picture was taken through a window and I couldn't get the rest of it in the shot. What I liked about this image is that it shows a working research telescope: papers on the desk, a computer, stacks of stuff and a water bottle. It's real.	I took this photo of a small roll off roof observatory. It reminded me of the observatory that we had at Hopkins. It would be a good backyard observatory structure.

Just a nice little sundial.	One of the volunteers had a small solar telescope here and people had a chance to look at the sunspots.
	This telescope mount (left) was retired in 1999 and it is just for display.

One of the remarkable and unexpected features of the observatory site is the mausoleum for Percival Lowell. It looks a lot like a telescope dome which isn't a design accident.