May Meeting Minutes
May, 3 2006
McCormick Observatory
Guest Speaker:
Jack Koester(CAS Member), Antique Telescopes.
7:01PM and Steve starts the meeting.
at 7:03 Jack Koester took the floor to speak publicly for the first time!
Ricky Patterson was thanked for his help setting up telescopes.
I'm a '73 UVa alumnus, I did take a lot of Astronomy courses till the physics requirement kicked in and I took economics courses!
King's astronomy book was in my high school library and sparked an interest in antique scopes. I fell in love with Unitrons in the mid sixties, but they were out of my price range.
Debbie Warner wrote "Alvan
Clark & Sons, Artists in Optics" (Smithsonian, 1968) and it continued
to hone my interest in
All these influences gelled for a time and then S&T
had a 1904
The Society got rolling and a tour of the USNO in DC was put together. 1993 convention in DC was a fun social event.
The Society has had numerous trips to observatories all
over the
In the 14 years we've existed the ATS has grown to about 200 members. We publish a journal, The Journal of the ATS, which needs an editor. There is a member who is a professional editor, but is busy earning a living. A special issue on Alvan Clark is coming out soon.
I like to use telescopes that you can observe with. I would love to have a Gregorian, but I can't imagine them being useful.
The 3 1/2" Cooke from 1900 is the black tube.
The 1906 4 1/2" Mogey in the room to your left. Mogey operated out of NJ. A more affordable scope than the Brashears.
Zeiss 60mm in the box in front of the room is built like a tank. Very distinctive and solid, very well made.
Henry Fitz and Alvan Clark were self trained, magnificent artisans. They got their lenses together and star test, then do local re-touching, working on a distinct area and got to 1/8 wave or better! Considering that the glass they had to work with was non-uniform it's more amazing.
Zeiss got the glass technology nailed down and made uniform glasses. A more scientific approach was used.
John Brashear had an 8th grade education, was a millwright in Pittsburgh, found a patron (Carnegie) at the Allegheny Observatory and eventually made lens blanks that started off nearly perfect, no bad zones!
Carnegie had Faw build Brashear a factory to make scopes and lenses. He was a mechanical genius.
Brashear made a polarizing solar eyepiece which uses polarization of the light to view the sun safely.
Yerkes' situation is still up
in the air, but the uproar around selling the observatory has maybe cooled the
Fitz uesd wood tubes that were tapered.
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http://webari.com/oldscope/ the ATS website.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oldscope/ the ATS discussion group.
http://www.europa.com/~telescope/binotele.htm Pete Abrahams' (ex-ATS president) personal web site on the history of the telescope and the binocular. It contains what is probably the world's most complete bibliography on the telescope.
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At 7:51 Steve Layman took the floor and delved into club business.
There are 51 members $2,209.46 in the till.
At Fan we made $ 170+ with the concession stand, 200 visitors or so. It was a crystal clear night and all had a fine time.
May 5th 8:30-10:30 at
Saturday the 6th 11:30-? Richard Drumm on the Mall,
1PM to 5PM solar observing at
7:30-11PM Moon & planets at
If you can help, please do so!
- June meeting: Don Wells of NRAO will speak on some radio astronomy topic.
- July meeting: Ed Murphy will talk about eclipses.
- August meeting: Remey Indebetouw talks about IR galactic surveys.
- September meeting: will be member show & tell.
There are still vacancies on the CAS retreat in Aug. We will go ahead and pay the down payment for the event.
The 10 minute topic is Richard Drumm
talking about the scale of the solar system and a scale model activity which
he'll do at
Snowden Hall won the dovetail bar door prize, donated by Ken's Rings!
The meeting adjourned at 8:15PM to the doghouse to view
and observe with the
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