On Sunday, Wendy and I went to the Starlight Festival, held at Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, WI.
We'd been to see Yerkes once before, but it was over a decade ago. It's a really old observatory, built in 1897, and was the leading observatory in the world during its peak. It still houses the world's largest refracting telescope, at a diameter of 40 inches.
I heard about the Starlight Festival through the local astronomy group. I was especially intrigued because, as part of the festivities, the observatory was selling tickets to look through the 40-inch telescope at night! They also planned to have astronomy lectures by various scientists.
Lake Geneva is only 45 minutes from our house, so we drove up first thing Sunday morning, because the telescope tickets were first-come, first-serve, and I really wanted to make sure we got them! After buying our tickets, we attended a lecture by Dr. Linda Spilker about "The Secrets of Saturn". She works at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and worked on the Cassini mission almost from the start. She is basically a pioneer of solar system exploration, and it was really inspiring to hear her talk.
After that, we went on a tour of the observatory, and heard all about its history and architecture.
This is the world's largest refracting telescope:
When the tour was over, we walked around a bit, and got to look through a solar telescope, where we observed several sun spots. They looked like tiny dots on the surface of the sun, but were really as big as the Earth. Crazy.
Then we watched some model rocket launches. They weren't the most amazing rockets ever, but it was still cool.
Then we decided it was time for ice cream. It was unseasonably hot last weekend, with highs in the mid-90's, so the ice cream was most welcome and most delicious. The night-time telescope-viewing tickets we purchased were for 9:30pm, and at this point it was past noon. We decided to head home, spend the afternoon in the cool comfort of our basement, and come back just before it got dark.
When we arrived later that evening, the sky was almost completely clear. Venus was shining bright in the west, and we could just make out the moon and Jupiter in the east through a grove of pine trees.
There were 30 or so people there for the 9:30pm viewing. It was scheduled for an hour, with other viewings starting at 10:30pm and 11:30pm. I was really excited as we filed into the observatory and sat down in front of the telescope. The slit in the dome was already open, so that the air temperature inside the dome would equalize with the outside air. When I sat down, I could just see the moon peeking through the slit:
There was one employee there who did all the work. He explained that we'd be looking at Jupiter and we'd each get a chance to look at it twice. The moon was not a good candidate that night, because it was almost full. A full moon means fewer shadows, and thus less detail when looking through a telescope.
Because Jupiter was low in the sky that night, he didn't have time to set up the telescope beforehand (we were in the first viewing that night). So as he explained everything, he went about setting it up. At first I was really annoyed by that, because it meant we'd have less time to look through the telescope. But my annoyance gradually turned to awe as he set things up.
For starters, the entire floor of the observatory was an elevator! He pressed a button and the whole floor started to raise up, closer to the telescope. This made sense, because the eyepiece at the bottom of the telescope would change height, depending on whether you were looking at object high in the sky, or low in the horizon.
Once the floor reached its highest position, he started to set up the telescope, and this is where my mind was really blown. I expected him to punch in coordinates into a computer, and the scope to gradually move to that position. Instead, he walks over, grabs a metal ring around the bottom of the scope, and manually swings the telescope around to point at the dome's open slit! I should mention that the telescope is over 60-feet long and weighs several tons! Watching him swivel the huge scope around all by himself was an incredible sight.
Here you can see him grabbing the metal ring to move the telescope:
And here it is, positioned at Jupiter:
You can also see the small finder telescope, which is attached to the big telescope, just below the metal ring. It's a 6-inch telescope he used to fine-tune the position of the big scope.
Whatever annoyance I had earlier was completely gone now. It was amazing watching him set everything up. I expected fancy, computerized gizmos, but, as he pointed out, it's all done using 1897 technology. Everyone who has ever used it since it was built has gone through the same process to set it up. Wow!
Once it was in position, we all got the chance to look at Jupiter. What struck me most was just how big Jupiter looked! Through the 6-inch finder telescope, it looked like a big dot. Through the 40-inch scope, it was a huge orange circle! I could just make out a hint of cloud bands in Jupiter, but not by much. Even though it was clear, the air wasn't great for viewing, but it was decent, he said. On a better night, we could have observed more detail. Still, it was an amazing sight.
We all got to look through the telescope 2 or 3 times. When the viewing was over, he lowered the floor back down so we could exit. You can see in this photo how much further down I was when taking the picture:
The telescope was still pointing at Jupiter when we left. I realized that the later groups wouldn't get to see him set up the telescope, which made me glad we got to.
At 10:30pm, it was all over. We made our way back to our car and drove home to Illinois.
What a fun experience!
