Every time we land someplace new, Laine and I invariably poke around Google Maps to get a feel for the area. We look for grocery stores or Walmarts, Starbucks stores, restaurants, everything. When we got to the Flagstaff area, I saw this dot on the north edge of town labeled The Lowell Observatory. I gave their website a quick skim and it looked interesting enough, so we added it to the list of places to checkout, time permitting.
As it worked out we visited on a Friday afternoon. The daily schedule of programs listed on the Observatory website looks frankly overly ambitious, the place didn’t seem large enough to have so many things going on nearly every night. But when we arrived and got the run down on everything that was going on “so far” that night from the staff at the ticket counter, it was clear we misjudged the place.
The best time to arrive is before dusk, it allows a chance to walk around and get your bearings. The various telescopes on site as well as indoor and outdoor exhibits are open to see before dark. A series of lectures and demonstrations run throughout the evening in different buildings. Laine and I penciled out a schedule to hit the ones that looked most interesting, ala college course catalog.
We moved from one thing to another learning about everything from the discovery of Pluto, to NASA’s Mars landers and the physics of the vacuum of space. But as night sky grew darker, it became all about the stargazing. The staff at the observatory run both the large telescopes, the Macalister and Clark, as well as several dobsonians, aligning them on “objects of opportunity” depending what is currently visible, the staff even took requests. Laine got very excited using the SkyView app on her iPhone to look for interesting sites in the heavens above us (and the tree line). It’s really great to be in a place like this where you can ask “can you point the telescope at the Crab Nebula?” and they say, “that sounds cool to look at, let me key that in” and in moments the observatory dome is spinning and a 16-inch telescope slewing around its mount for your viewing pleasure.
The crown jewel of the Lowell Observatory has to be the Clark Telescope, a gorgeous twenty-four-inch refractor commissioned in 1895 and built by Alvan Clark and Sons of Cambrigdeport, Massachusetts. Percival Lowell initially used the telescope to look for signs of life on Mars, and the alignment of its mount and the building it is housed in were optimized for this use. While somewhat silly sounding now, his work did help to popularize space science, and the Clark would go on to make more serious marks in scientific history. Measurements of red shift in galaxies made by Vesto Slipher using the Clark and a spectrograph contributed empirical evidence showing that the universe is expanding. In the 1960s, NASA scientists used the telescope to help map the Moon’s surface, and Apollo Astronauts used it in preparation for their landings on the Moon.
Since the 1980s, the Clark Telescope has primarily been an educational tool, treating tens of thousands of visitors each year to otherwise hidden views of the universe. A twenty-month $300,000 restoration completed in 2015 brought new life to the century old instrument. It gleams from every polished piece of brass and varnished control knob. The immensity of the device when standing next to it brings to mind H.G. Wells stories and Buck Rogers comics. But in a testament to precise design and balance, as well as the restoration work, the enormous optical tube can, and is, moved by hand. Small spotting scopes attached to the tube, like a surveyor’s transit, magnify the ascension and declination markings around the pivots of the telescope’s mount some twenty feet off the ground to aid the location of celestial bodies. Once aligned on an object in the sky, a modern electric drive keeps the tube locked on instead of the original mechanical clock, a small concession to the modern-day convenience.
Walking into the observatory a visitor, even one who isn’t a science buff, you can’t help but be awestruck. The wood decking around the telescope creaks underfoot; and the spidery wooden dome above with its delicate pulley opened shutters and wooden viewing chairs hanging from rolling tracks, all evoke an elegance and memory of turn of the century citizen scientists. The Clark is grand and impressive, but as you look into the eyepiece it creates an intimate connection to the stars and the cosmos that no computer screen or smartphone can match. Peering into that final optical element you are viewing something “alive,” not filtered or enhanced; and though it may be tens of thousands of light years away the telescope has brought that celestial object to a piece of glass less than an inch from your eye. It is an experience made all the more marvelous by the beauty and majesty of the machine.
Experiences like those offered at the Lowell Observatory bring science to life. It is especially great to watch children getting excited by looking into the night sky and seeing planets and galaxies for the first time. Only places like this can really do that, not Wikipedia or the National Geographic Channel. The light from a television screen simply can’t hold a candle to the light from a distant star.
