This is an astounding telescope. Yes, it is a telescope. It was designed and built in 1912 by James Hartness who owned a precision machine company in Springfield, Vermont, called Jones & Lamson. Hartness was governor of Vermont at one time, and a pilot who bought and flew a Wright Flyer aircraft. This is a concrete structure with the other half of it underground. And the cool thing is that he built a heated underground tunnel from his home to the telescope! That means in a typical Vermont winter, when it was cold and snow was on the ground, he could still observe the stars in comfort. The telescope itself is a 10" refractor, with the lens at the end of that stainless steel tube pointing up toward the sky.
The inside of the telescope gives you the feeling that you are in a submarine. You walk up the step that you can see here and stand at the eyepiece, as Jim is doing in the photograph below. The eyepiece is close to his arm, on the right in the photo below.
These are some of the gears that are connected to the motor that runs the telescope. So here is the slightly scary thing - when you are standing at the eyepiece, which is where I am standing to take this picture, the gears are slowly going around! So you have to be very careful in the dark!
And this is the eyepiece of the telescope. And notice more gears going around! Of course they turn very slowly. What is amazing about this telescope, is that it is a really heavy duty piece of industrial machinery, which is what they were really good at building in Vermont at the time.
2 comments:
Wonderful stories and great photos. That he had the forethought to build a tunnel is amazing.
Joan
As soon as I saw this photo of the cement telescope, I knew I had seen it before. So I used the search and lo and behold, you have other photos. I remembered the story about the tunnel so he could go from his house to the telescope in the winter. Very clever. An amazing piece of machinery. betsey
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