Wall to Wall Telescopes!

Today was the first day of two days of NEAF, the North East Astronomy Forum, which I have been going to for years.  It bagan back in 1991 and has morphed into the largest astronomy show on the east coast.  If there is a telescope that you are interested in, or eyepieces for filters or books or telescope mounts or binoculars and every other thing you can imagine, this is the place to come to see the actual item before you decide to buy it.  This is a panorama from the balcony of the Field House at Rockland Community College where the exhibits are.  There are also presentations by speakers - this year a lot of astronauts from the US Space program as well as managers and journalists talking.  CLICK ON THIS PANORAMA TO SEE IT MUCH LARGER.

I love this photograph of two guys, and telescopes in the background pointing in every direction!  These are mostly Unitron telesopes which were really popular back in the 1950's to about 1975, and they were known for their high quality and beautiful construction,.  They were manufactured in Japan for the American company.

Here is a portrait of me with Russell Porter, of Vermont who was the father of the Amateur Telescope Makers movement that started with a class of 14 men and one woman in Springfield, Vermont, in 1920.  Oh, that's just a cardboard cutout of Mr. Porter.  He was not at the event.

Here are seven pair of giant binoculars on tripods lined up for all to see.  It must be magnificent to study the night sky with binoculars this large when you are in an area that is away from all the light pollution.

 

An Amazing Group of People!

Today was the Hartness House Workshop, a part of the Stellafane Convention.  It was a day long program that included a dinner and a featured speaker.  This year many of the talks were about the history of astronomy, and in particular, the work of Russell Porter, a native son of Springfield, Vermont and a legend in amateur astronomy.  I realized after about the third talk today I was feeling really happy to be here. Because I was in a room of people passionate about astronomy and history and telescope making, among other things. There were professional astronomers, and amateurs and students who had all come to learn more about their hobby, and everyone was happy to share their knowledge with others.  I was happy because sometimes the world these days seems so negative with politics and people forgetting about being kind to others and behaving badly.  But here was a room of really smart people whose energy was directed to science and astronomy, and sharing with each other.  It really brightened my day!

One of our speakers was from Cal Tech and he spoke of the ideas Russell Porter had on the design of the Palomar Observatory having to do with his work as both an architect, and of the design of the 200 inch telescope.

This gentleman came from Washington, DC and he told the story of the U.S. Naval Observatory and the importance of the work done with the 26" Clark "Great Equatorial" telescope which was used to discover Phobos and Deimos, two of the moons of Mars.  That telescope was installed 150 years ago and is still in use today!

 

In My Happy Place!

Today I drove to Springfield, Vermont to attend the Stellafane Convention for amateur telescope makers.  Traffic was really light the whole way, so I got off I-91 and drove over to Windsor Locks, and went to the New England Air Museum.  I have been there once or twice before but that was years ago.  So another visit was in order.  I saw that they had a North American F-100 Super Sabre on display but there was a chain across the steps leading to the cockpit.  I was talking with one of the docents, who had been an Air Force pilot and asked if I could go up and look in the cockpit.  He removed the chain and said that I could SIT in it!  Wow.  This aircraft is special to me because when I was in the US Air Force I got to refuel this kind of aircraft, and I loved seeing these supersonic fighter jets coming and going, and the takeoffs in full afterburner were impressive to see and hear, particularly at night!  So to finally sit in one was the dream of the 12-year old kid I am!  And the docent was kind enough to use my camera to take a photograph of me.

This is the really impressive ceiling of the entrance to the museum!  Just a stunning view when you first walk in the front door.  So, yes, today I was in my happy place!

 

The Abandoned Factory

                               

I decided to drive through the town of Springfield to show Stan what the town looked like.  The shortest route from RT 91 to Stellafane does not go through town.  I thought I would also show him this abandoned factory - you know how much I love to photograph old buildings.  The area from Springfield, Vermont down to Hartford, Connecticut which ran along the Connecticut river, was known as "Precision Valley."  In the 1850s, the waterpower of the Connecticut River enabled these precision machines to operate and produce consumer goods. In the 20th Century, the machine tool industry in Vermont became a huge sector of our economy.  I have been coming to Stellafane for 32 years now, and I think this building has been empty for a good deal of that time.

I thought that the broken window was the most dramatic photograph so I started this post with that image.  This gives you an idea of the building and the landscape.  I love that a woman was walking up the hill and so I waited for her to be turning the corner so that she was silhouetted against the road.

It is difficult most times, to take a single photograph that will give you the best sense of a subject.  And that was certainly the case here.

As you can see here there is more than a single building at this site.

Fortunately, with all the broken windows I could get a photograph of the inside of the lower floor of the building.  This is a photograph of a huge metal lathe, which is not a surprise because manufacturing requires  heavy duty tools like this.  In the distance, on the right is a huge drill press.

In looking at this view of the buildings, from across the river, you can see that the complex is made up of 5 separate buildings stuck together.  In the far left side of this photo, there is a black square visible under the last building.  I believe that water entered the building somewhere near the center of this photograph, flowed through a turbine and exited down near the black square. The turbine was connected to a belt drive.  Originally in these old buildings, the belt was connected to an overhead drive shaft, and from that shaft were other belts which connected to the manufacturing machinery.  With so many belts connected to machines which were running you had to be REALLY careful about where your hands and arms were!  These were not the days of OSHA where all the belts and shafts needed guards to protect workers.

The Amateur Telescope Maker

The Stellafane Convention is about telescope making.  The main event is on Saturday morning when people who have built telescopes display them on the main telescope field.  There is a judging for those who want to be judged, but for many, their main purpose is to display their handiwork for others to see.  I saw this young woman named Stefania and her telescope and asked her about it. It is her first telescope, and I commented on the fact that the telescope tube was segmented - it is an octagon - and that construction was wonderful and that I knew it took a lot more work to do it this way.  I mentioned that it required a lot of skill to get the bevels correct on each strip of wood, she said "Yes - the angles that I cut were 22 1/2 degrees!"   Wow!  Here is a young woman who is skilled at woodworking!  She was given an award, along with 3 other people, for displaying their very first telescope!  It is so heartening to see younger people building telescopes, and as the father of two daughters I applaud seeing a young woman who is so adept at woodworking.  

This is an overall view of the field where everyone was displaying their telescopes.  On the left is an historical telescope build on the Stellafane property back in the 1930's by members of the Springfield Telescope Makers.  Next year is the 80th anniversary of the Stellafane Convention!

 

Sea Cliff to Springfield, VT

Stan Honda and I left Sea Cliff this morning, enroute to Springfield, Vermont, home of the Stellafane Convention.  Lots of traffic on Long Island, of course, but the skies really opened up when we were going through Wethersfield, Connecticut.  We stopped there at a Panera for lunch, and when the rain stopped, we continued north.  Then the clouds opened up with rain!  Many of you will be thrilled to know that Stan was driving, so I had both hands available for the camera!  I didn't have to deal with keeping the car on the road!  Eventually the rain stopped, and we had dry roads through most of Massachusetts and Vermont

Hartness Turret Telescope

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.

Stellafane!

So this is Stellafane.  "Stellafane" means "Shrine to the Stars" and it has a rich history.  This pink clubhouse was built in 1923 by the Springfield Amateur Telescope Makers, and the legend is they went to the local hardware store and asked if the proprietor could donate any paint for the clubhouse, and the owner said sure, as long as he could pick the color!  This building is a national historic landmark.  This is my 30th year here at Stellafane, and by now I have so many friends that I see here once a year.  There is such a rich tradition here because of all the history over the years.

This is a view of the telescope field in front of the clubhouse.  The white "house" with the dome is actually a concrete telescope designed so that the astronomers in the old days could observe from within the structure in the Vermont winter without having to come out in the cold.  There are telescopes all over this field on display for judging.

And here is a cool story.  This is Tim and his wife Julia with their newly finished telescope awaiting judging.  The amazing thing is that I met Tim when I took the drone course at Syracuse University!  It's a small world!  The great news is that Tim and his wife won three prizes for their telescope, both for the optics, the mechanical design, and for the craftsmanship!  And this was their first telescope!

Exoplanets

I had an amazing day today, for a couple of different reasons.  I was at the Hartness House Workshop in Springfield, Mass, for a series of lectures on exoplanets.  This is a workshop that takes place a day before the Stellafane Convention starts.  So most of the people in this photograph are PhD's doing their post doctoral work.  One is from Yale, one from MIT, one from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  And they are way younger than I am and much smarter!  Each of them delivered a lecture on the science and discovery methods of finding exoplanets, to an enthusiastic audience of amateur astronomers. (OK so I will explain here, that these are planets that orbit stars outside our solar system.) The cool thing for me was that I felt I was getting smarter just by being in the same room with all of them!  It is wonderful to meet and listen to the next generation of up and coming astronomers.  The co-chair of the event thought it would be important to do a group photo.  The huge white cement thing in the background is a telescope that was built in 1915, and it is designed to keep the observer warm in the middle of the Vermont winters!

This is Stellafane!

I have been coming to the Stellafane Convention, a gathering of amateur telescope makers,  for 26 years now.  Springfield, Vermont is where amateur telescope making was born, back in the 1920's.  Telescopes were so expensive, that if you wanted one, and you were not rich, you had to build one yourself.  Springfield was home to a number of precision machine tool makers, and they had the knowledge and skills required, and through articles in Scientific American, the information was passed on to other interested amateurs across the United States.  But it all started here.  The "Pink Clubhouse" is now on the national list of historic places.  You can see home made telescopes set up all around the field.  The white structure with the domed front is a concrete telescope, made in 1939, and you observe from inside the structure, during the bitter Vermont winters.

The Black River

I was indoors all day at a conference on Double Stars.  After the dinner and the keynote talk I was headed back to the bed and breakfast.  As I crossed the bridge over the Black River, the reflection of the sky in the water briefly caught my attention.  I was not sure if there was a picture there, but I drove down the road and parked in a parking lot and walked back to the bridge.  There was something about the muted tones and the dark silhouettes that I really loved the feeling of.  And I love the name "Black River." It flows through the heard of Springfield, Vermont, and is a source of power for the many industrial factories built on her shores.  

Black River Waterfall

I continued my exploration of the Black River.  That is the river that runs through Springfield, Vermont, and it is the river that powered so many businesses in the years past.  This view is from a bridge which crosses the river, and I am looking down about 30 feet to the rocks and the water.  I thought it was interesting how the waterfall split apart and then recombined.  The photograph is so blue because I shot it after the sun had set, and the scene was illuminated by only the blue sky.

Like an English Mill Town

I have been coming to Springfield, VT for 25 years now.  I haven't explored the town very much, but I did this year.  I did a lot of walking around, looking for old factory buildings.  This town was known as "Precision Valley" because of all the machine tool companies that once existed here.  So I walked around and photographed.  As I was heading back up the hill to my car, I saw this scene, that reminded me of photographs I had seen by an English photographer, of old mill towns in the UK.  While composing a photograph, suddenly a car came down hill with its lights on, and I realized I had the shot!  I love the mood of this, and decided to convert it to black & white.

The Whale and the Waterfall

I spent some time photographing some of the old factories in Springfield.  Apparently water power was used in the old days for power, and in fact, there is apparently a small electric generating plant downriver that still operates.  I think that this waterfall is part of the water power arrangement.  Anyhow, I was prowling around at the end of the day, and saw this rock that appeared to be to be some kind of large fish swimming upstream.  OK, so I have a vivid imagination.  I mean, it does have two eyes...

After Edward Hopper

After dinner the other night, the sun was still up, so I drove to downtown Springfield, VT to look for photographs.  There are some old factories that are there - more on this another day - and then I saw the late afternoon sun on these two homes on Main Street.  They caught my eye right away because of the light on them, and it felt as if the lighting was similar to that in so many paintings by Edward Hopper.  It's funny, there was no question about composition with this image.  Sometimes I look around for 15 minutes and try different things, but not for this photo.  It felt right just like this.

The Pilgrimage to Mecca

The pilgrimage to Mecca is a religious duty that must be carried out at least once in a lifetime. This is a different pilgrimage to a different "Mecca." Adam and Jessica, as budding amateur telescope makers, made their first pilgrimage this weekend to the birthplace of amateur telescope making in America. The Stellafane Convention began in the 1920's, in Springfield, Vermont. Some people have come here as teenagers, and are still attending 40 years later. I first came here in 1989, and this was my 23rd convention in a row. This is Adam and Jess' first convention, and they brought Jess' commercially made telescope. Next year they are planning to return with their first home-made telescope. I can't wait to see that!

The Secret

Talk about nonstop! From LAX to JFK to Springfield Vermont, in the space of 24 hours! I am now at the Stellafane Convention for amateur telescope makers, after a quick turnaround in Sea Cliff and a 5 hour drive! I saw these clouds around sunset and only had a minute or two to compose this image. Or should I say, to select this much of the image from the surroundings. The secret? I was in a shopping center, and if I lowered the camera about 5 degrees you would see a sign that said "Radio Shack!" And you thought I was in the woods somewhere! They are beautiful clouds, though.

Fellows Gear Shaper Company

I suddenly realized that I have been coming to Springfield, Vermont to the telescope maker's convention for 20 years! And I have driven by this factory twice a day for the three days I have been here each year. FINALLY, when I was leaving the conference on Sunday, I stopped to photograph this factory. I have seen it when it was a going business, but it went into bankruptcy back in 2002. Springfield is located in the center of the "Precision Valley" region, which was the home of the Vermont machine tool industry, where a new era of precision manufacturing first began. I love the architecture and the settings of the buildings and factories in these New England towns. Fellows Gear Shaper company began here in 1897 and was originally powered with the water from the Black River, in the foreground. I spent about an hour photographing all around here, and I will be showing you more photographs as time goes on. The sky was particularly nice on this day - it was raining and I got wet, but the rain made for some really nice photos. Stay tuned.

The Black River

This is the Black River in Springfield, Vermont. Today I took a billion photographs! No Joke. You will be seeing some of them in the next couple of weeks. I have photographs from the convention, of an old factory, and of the landscape. I stopped to photograph the factory today which is located on the Black River, and while looking around, saw this photograph. I love the complexity of it, with the foreground flowers, the river, and the reflections of the sky. It's a really interesting balance of all the different elements.