Leander McCormick Observatory
The McCormick Observatory is an observatory of the University of Virginia and is located in Charlottesville , Virginia (USA) on the summit of Mount Jefferson (which is therefore also called Observatory Hill ).
It is named after Leander J. McCormick , who donated much of the money for the telescope and dome. The observatory was completed in 1885 and had one of the largest refractors of the time with a diameter of 65 cm, made by Alvan Clark & Sons , an improved version of the twin in the US Naval Observatory . The dome with a diameter of around 15 meters was designed by Warner and Swasey .
The scientific investigations concentrated on determining the distance of stars using the parallax method, thousands of stars were measured in this way. The observatory is now used for training and to make astronomy accessible to a wide audience.
literature
- Deborah Jean Warner, Robert B. Ariail: Alvan Clark & Sons, Artists in Optics 1995, ISBN 0943396468 .
- John Rodgers: Letter to the Hon. RW Thompson, Secretary of the Navy, Announcing the Discovery of the Satellites of Mars , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1877, Vol 37, pp. 443-445.
- History of McCormick Observatory [1]
- Norbert Lyons: The McCormick reaper legend; the true story of a great invention . Exposition Press, New York 1955.
Web links
- Homepage
- Leander McCormick Observatory Clear Sky Clock Forecasts of observing conditions.
Individual evidence
Coordinates: 38 ° 1 ′ 57.7 ″ N , 78 ° 31 ′ 20.6 ″ W.