Where's Gramps?

Where's Gramps?  Where's the fuel?  This was a gas station and the remains of a mart right next to Interstate 35 leading to Minneapolis, and seven miles outside of Northfield.  It looks as if it has been abandoned for quite a while now.  Not sure what happened to Gramps.  Of course I love nothing better than photographing any kind of ruin.  I made this photograph fairly early in the morning on the way out of town, and stopped again later, on the way back, when it was overcast.  I have some nice close up views of some of the buildings in overcast light, but this seems to be the best version of the overall scene.

A Happening Place!

You are probably bored with all my telescope photographs, so I am offering something different.  During my first day in Minnesota I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  I arrived late in the day, but was really lucky because that day the museum was open until 9 PM. There was so much going on in the museum.  I got to take a tour of a new photographic exhibit, by the curator of photography, there was another talk by an author, and at one point I looked down from the second floor balcony to see these people on their backs in a circle.  There was a woman leading the group, but I couldn't quite hear what this was all about.  They are looking up through the circular opening in the floor surrounded by a balcony at a painted dome ceiling.  They made an interesting design as seen from above, though.

Fun Photographing the Telescope

One thing that Antique Telescope Society members all do is take pictures.  Of telescopes.  Of each other.  You wouldn't believe how they crawl all over the telescopes and observatories, photographing all kinds of details.  I have some other fun photos of people examining things in the observatory.  Stay tuned.

Class Portrait

Every year at the Antique Telescope Society Convention, we do a "class portrait."  This the portrait for this year, at the Goodsell Observatory.  What I want you to see is not so much the class, but the observatory.  It is an absolutely beautiful building.  The cornerstone was laid in 1886.  The first instrument installed was something called a Meridian circle.  It was used to observe stars as they crossed the meridian, and from that they could calculate the exact time.  The observatory would then sell this time service to both jewelry stores, and more importantly, the railroads. Obviously railroads need to know the exact time so that their trains would not collide.  This time service supported the observatory for years. Here is a photograph of the Meridian circle telescope.  There is a slit that opens in the ceiling of the room above the telescope so the telescope can see the sky.

The 16.2-inch Brashear

This is a magnificent historical telescope, still in use at the Goodsell Observatory at Carleton College. The lens was made by John Brashear, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, back in 1890. When it was installed, the scope was the sixth largest in the U.S. and the 12th largest in the world.  It is 22 feet long, and weighs 27,000 pounds.  We got to observe through this telescope on two nights.  This is Taylor, the student who operated the telescope for us. 

 In order to find astronomical objects in the sky, you need to know the Right Ascension and Declination of the object, which is the sky's version of Longitude and Latitude. So what's really cool is that Taylor is sitting at the eyepiece end of the telescope, and using her iPhone to find this information!  How's that for a comparison of two different technologies that are separated by one hundred and twenty four years!  If you are curious, the yellow instrument she is holding controls the rotating dome - she needs to keep the opening in the dome in front of the telescope at all times.

River View

This is a view from the 5th Street Bridge which crosses the Cannon River in Northfield, Minnesota.  It was a calm day, and the surface of the river was like a mirror.  I thought the architecture of the buildings was interesting - they don't look like American buildings, they seem more European in appearance.  Which is why I like this photograph.  The arched bridge in the background also seems European as well.  Kind of a lucky moment on a Sunday afternoon, to find this scene.

American Monuments

The American photographer Frank Gohlke has said "The grain elevator is the essential American monument.  No other structure so completely testifies to the vastness of the American landscape and the magnitude of its production."  Driving from Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to downtown, I passed a huge number of different grain elevators stretching nearly a mile. On my last day in Minnesota, I drove back to the site and spent a couple of hours photographing these structures.  They are enormous - most are one-hundred feet tall or more.  They are used for storing grain received from farmers, before being shipped to processors.  In Minneapolis, many of these storage facilities were used to store wheat, before being ground into flour by all the mills along the Mississippi River.  Please click on each of these to see them in more detail.