Harvary College Observatory Project

This forum is for discussing all things astronomical that aren't directly related to the activities of the MAS.
Post Reply
User avatar
BradNasset
Posts: 206
Joined: Mon Aug 29, 2016 7:49 pm
Real Name: Brad Nasset

Harvary College Observatory Project

Post by BradNasset »

In the last issue of Sky & Telescope there was an article titled "Star Notes" about the OLD notebooks from Harvard women astronomers. They had a link to a crowd-source project to help them sort out the scanned images of all the books. I tried it, and have looked at upwards of 2,000 pages. For this go-around all they are looking for is to mark the pages that contain sketches or drawings, so it goes pretty fast. Thought I would share three of them that caught my eye. One is the charting of Neptune in 1846-1847. One is the tracking Mars in 1877. The other is a very neat page of numbers, but I don't know what they are for. Whenever one of these neat ones popped up on the screen it always caught my eye so I just started writing the dates down. Apparently this female astronomer 'observer' (initials WAR) and her 'recorder' (initials JFM) did this complex stuff from 1872-1879. Just thought that was a bit like honoring and touching the past.
Attachments
Neat page-1872-1877-b.jpg
Neat page-1872-1877-b.jpg (1.24 MiB) Viewed 6820 times
Mars 1877.jpg
Mars 1877.jpg (1.89 MiB) Viewed 6820 times
Neptune position charting year 1846-b.jpg
Neptune position charting year 1846-b.jpg (942.94 KiB) Viewed 6820 times
Brad Nasset
ELO, CGO Keyholder
Celestron Edge HD 8 inch, CGEM mount, with HyperStar system
Celestron C8 (Classic 1975 orange-tube), RA drive, equatorial wedge
Celestron 5 inch truss tube Newtonian, “Astronomers Without Borders” scope
3-D Printed 114/900 Reflector- homemade by me
Celestron 15x70 binocs, Homemade parallelogram binocs mount
Meade 10x52 binocs
Vixen 2.1 x 42 Binocs
Post Reply