Robert-Mayer-Volks- und Schulsternwarte Heilbronn
The Robert-Mayer-Volks- und Schulsternwarte Heilbronn ( RMS ) is a people's observatory in Heilbronn , which is located on the roof of one of the wings of the Robert-Mayer-Gymnasium . It is very well equipped in terms of instruments and has a historical hollow globe as a special feature .
tour
Ninety-six steps must be climbed to reach the school observatory . Here she uses some rooms in the Mönchsee wing of the Heilbronn grammar school. The lecture room is equipped with all the important media: from the blackboard to the cross-fade slide projector , overhead projectors to video projectors and numerous models about astronomy and space travel , everything is available to be able to work in a didactic sense. A further 25 steps lead through the tower room to the actual observatory, the roof platform.
There are several buildings here. The most striking of these is the domed room. Its rotating domed roof can be seen from a great distance. A subsequent extension is used as a tool shed. The former Meridiankreishaus has housed the observatory's new, high-performance reflector telescope since it was converted into a folding roof hut . Finally, the rotating hollow globe can be found on the platform , a relic from the time the observatory was founded. This rare device, a kind of “mechanical planetarium”, probably only has three siblings worldwide.
The most important thing in the observatory are of course the telescopes . The main device for guided tours is located in the dome: a Coudé refractor . With its 2250 mm focal length and a lens diameter of 150 mm, it enables particularly good observation of the sun , moon and planets . The lens telescope, which cost 75,000 DM at the time , was purchased from Carl Zeiss in Jena with the help of donations and was inaugurated on September 6, 1983.
A C14 reflector telescope has been set up in the former Meridian Circle House since April 1995 . This device, worth 38,000 DM, was also financed entirely from donations. As part of guided tours, it is used to observe faint objects such as galaxies , globular clusters , emission and planetary nebulae . It has an opening of 356 mm and is still only 76 cm long with a focal length of 4000 mm due to its compact design.
Of course, an observatory cannot only live with permanently installed devices. Mobility is very important in view of the enormous light and air pollution in the urban area. Since the Heilbronn basin is a constant haze over the city, amateur astronomers often seek refuge in the near and far. However, this requires mobile devices, which are also available in abundance.
The two C8 mirror telescopes should be emphasized. Despite their compact design, these Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes with a mirror diameter of 20 cm provide similar optical performance as the Coudé refractor . Primarily used in management operations as a supplement to the dome telescope, our members are also happy to borrow them.
At this point, of course, we cannot go into the entire inventory of the observatory. Some important and worth seeing devices should nevertheless be mentioned: In addition to a collection of historical telescopes and field measuring devices ( theodolites ) from the past century, the Robert Mayer Observatory also has a special refractor (90/900 mm) for observing the sun prominences , a computer-controlled CCD -Astro camera, a receiving system for Meteosat images and much more.
history
Before 1914
From the Heilbronner school had gradually established a royal since 1826 Real Institute replaced, in a school , the secondary school was built. In 1889 this school, together with the commercial and advanced training school, received its own school building at today's Bismarckstrasse 10. The building, which was built in 1886, was significantly expanded in 1901 and 1914/15. On the main staircase of the originally two-storey main wing of this school complex, which was handed over in 1889, a roof platform was demonstrably set up for astronomical observations. All schools should have access to this “school panorama”. The grammar school chronicle of 1912 reports that Professor Klein donated 95 marks from the proceeds of astronomical lectures to purchase astronomical photographs and 142 marks to purchase a photographic apparatus. On March 19, 1914, 284 marks were made available to repay the purchase of a telescope.
Between 1914 and 1944
In the fall of 1908, Karl Wildermuth came to the Oberrealschule and the Realgymnasium (OR & RG) as a physics and mathematics teacher . This double institution emerged from the aforementioned royal real institution and from a further separation from the grammar school. Around 1938 the co-education introduced at OR & RG was canceled and the school became the Robert-Mayer-Oberschule for boys , from 1953 on to the Robert-Mayer-Gymnasium, which still exists today .
On April 23, 1914, the city council of Heilbronn indicated and announced on June 25, 1914, that foundations were in prospect for the establishment of an observatory and that the city of Heilbronn would therefore be able to use the wing of the OR & RG on Mönchseestrasse that was currently under construction Take precautions such as reinforced walls.
With the Robert Mayer observatory, Wildermuth had a combined public and school observatory in mind, as can also be seen from passages of the minutes of the municipal council meeting of June 8, 1917, which deal with the management of guided tours and the administration of the facility. However, the local council was only “delighted” about the foundations and efforts of Wildermuth and left the further deliberations to its administrative committee and the then Mayor Paul Göbel . The files on these events were burned on December 4, 1944 during the bombing raid on Heilbronn. The original proposal by Wildermuth and the then rector of OR & RG Rudolf Diez to appoint a five-person board of directors for the Robert Mayer observatory was probably not implemented. The Robert Mayer Observatory has in fact been taken over by the school where it is located. However, it was not possible to operate as a public observatory. The fate of the great success of a combined public and school observatory in Heilbronn up to the loss of the valuable equipment in the turmoil of the Second World War was almost predetermined due to a wrong organizational form .
After Wildermuth left Heilbronn in 1920, the observatory was mostly only used as a school observatory. Only the teacher Hans Seitz offered lectures and guided tours between 1929 and 1933. He also published monthly astronomical reports, together with Kuno Fladt a two-edition textbook on astronomy and the method and practice of teaching celestial science . Seitz also invented and initiated various astronomical teaching aids and educational films.
The "ancestral line" of the RMS
- 1914–1919: Karl Wildermuth
- 1919–1927: unknown, but an astronomical yearbook exists from this period, so the observatory was probably used
- 1927-1928: Deker
- 1928: Greiner
- 1929–1939: Hans Seitz
- 1940: Dussler
The observatory was used as a school observatory until the Second World War , but in the post-war chaos the equipment was smashed and the library destroyed on the orders of the American military administrator. The Mönchsee wing with the observatory is one of the few buildings in Heilbronn that survived the air raid of December 1944 and the reconstruction.
Former instruments
Structurally, everything had existed since the winter of 1914/15 except the equipment room, which was built before 1928. All devices at the observatory were probably set up in 1919, with the exception of a second astro camera, which was probably installed in 1928. The school observatory with the best equipment of its time stood in Heilbronn. The rare rotating hollow star globe and an older telescope were taken over from the old inventory in the observatory. A larger room on the third floor of the school building was intended for astronomy and could be heated separately. There was a Rieffler pendulum clock with a time recorder and probably another clock in the stairwell to the platform, the tower room . The current, used clock was installed around 1979. Since radio clocks provide more precise time information today , it is no longer in operation. In the dome, a Zeiss refractor with an opening of around 10 cm was installed and, in parallel, two astro cameras with the same opening with a one meter focal length and plate formats of 9 cm × 12 and 13 cm × 18 cm. The refractor could have been a telescope with a 13 cm lens opening and a 2.30 m focal length. The second camera was probably installed in 1928 and put too much strain on the mount so that photography was hardly possible. In the meridian circle house there was a meridian circle with a four centimeter opening and a bent beam path for measuring star positions. The instruments were supplemented by a camera for sun shots with a diameter of around 12 cm and a spectrograph for the main telescope. It is not known which devices were present on the platform for the five stone pedestals for student internships. The observatory equipment was to be relocated to Ernst Wecker's private observatory in Mainhardt around 1941 on the recommendation of Hans Seitz . However, they were only brought to the school building's basement. After the war ended, they were destroyed by former Polish forced laborers in order to loot the metal. On the orders of the US military administrator, the library was also destroyed because the books had swastika stamps. The wing of the Robert Mayer Observatory survived the destruction of Heilbronn in the middle of a desert of rubble.
1945 to 1979
After the reconstruction of today's Robert-Mayer-Gymnasium after the war, the observatory was initially empty. In the years between 1945 and 1979 it was therefore only used sporadically. The annex that now houses the toilet facilities was probably built with the reconstruction.
In 1952 Ernst Wecker legally donated a refractor (60/680 mm) with clockwork tracking to the THG, which was then housed in the Mönchsee wing of the building, for installation in the empty dome of the Robert Mayer Observatory and “for all Heilbronn students”. The alarm clock refractor was in the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium (THG) for a long time and came back to the observatory in 2010.
This year the city renovated the observatory for the first time, for which StR Schultheiss was responsible. At the beginning of the 1950s, Messrs. Bühler and Gerstenberger from the Swabian People's Observatory in Stuttgart held several adult education courses in Heilbronn. Since the THG took the refractor donated by Wecker to its new building on the corner of Gymnasium- and Karlstrasse, Wecker asked Mayor Paul Meyle in 1957 to procure a Kosmos E68 refractor for the dome of the observatory . Around 1960, the grammar school teacher Bernd Prätor headed a school astronomy group at the observatory for a year. In addition to the Kosmos refractor, the observatory is now in possession of two old refractors, one of which probably comes from the historical inventory (constructed between 1820 and 1840). The second refractor, a two-inch model with a wooden tube from around 1913, was bought by Wecker around 1950. Both devices come from Merz. Between 1960 and 1979 the observatory lay largely idle. Occasionally, Franz Speck's pupils were given keys to make observations with the modest telescopes. In the spring semester of 1979 Werner Baier held a well-attended introductory course in astronomy at the VHS Heilbronn. He visits the observatory three times with some of the participants in his course. The participants also include Holger Sturm (then a 10th grade student at Justinus-Kerner-Gymnasium). In March 1979, Sturm received the key to the observatory. In the following years he pushed ahead with the reconstruction of the observatory.
Reconstruction 1979–1987
The dedicated reconstruction of the observatory began with Holger Sturm. Shortly after receiving the key to the observatory, by chance he found a book in which he found a picture and description of the rotating hollow globe of the observatory - the author was Professor Seitz, who headed the observatory from 1929 to 1938. Holger Sturm was able to contact him. Much of our current knowledge about the equipment, objectives, history and work of the old observatory comes from research by Holger Sturm and the correspondence with Seitz.
In October 1979, Holger Sturm also contacted the then First Mayor and later Lord Mayor Manfred Weinmann . In doing so, he succeeded in rekindling the city of Heilbronn's fundamental interest in the observatory. Together with the physics professor Friedrich Rumold from the seminar for high school teacher training in Heilbronn and Mr. StD Grünenwald, the head of the physical collection at the Mönchseegymnasium Heilbronn, funds were made available for a central astronomical collection in the city of Heilbronn, which essentially consists of two C8 telescopes, two cameras and literature duration. Since Karlheinz Klein was also a physics and astronomy teacher at the RMG at that time, the long-term use of the observatory seemed secure. Therefore the city of Heilbronn carried out a renovation of the observatory building. It was clear that the 68 mm Kosmos refractor, which at that time was the “main device” in the dome on the column of the much larger, destroyed Zeiss refractor, needed a successor. As a result of discussions with other observatories, the Coudé refractor (150/2250 mm) from Zeiss in Jena (then still GDR ) emerged as the telescope to be aimed for. Rumold and the headmaster of the RMG, Franz Speck, applied to the city of Heilbronn to provide the corresponding funds for the 1981 budget.
In order to relieve the city with the purchase - after all, it was almost 75,000 DM - an appeal to the foundation was drawn up, which initially raised a sum of 20,000 DM. As part of the supplementary budget 1982, on the advice of the mayor's office, the missing funds were finally approved by the local council after it was made clear that the observatory should not be used "as a private amusement for some students" and for "astrology and things like that", like the then cultural department head Pfister reported first. In agreement with the Prime Minister Lothar Späth, Weinmann was finally able to win over the Südwestdeutsche Salzwerke AG to take over the municipal part entirely on the occasion of its centenary in 1983, so that the new telescope could be financed entirely through donations. The ceremonial handover took place on September 6, 1983. Since Holger Sturm studied in Göttingen from 1982, the observatory was looked after by Klein and the students Matthias Albrecht and Michael Scholz. Since the spring of 1984 a school astronomy work group of the RMG has taken place under the direction of Klein. The first public tours also took place in 1984, initially only on Wednesdays during school days when the sky was clear. However, the number of visitors was very low. A program of events has therefore been published since 1984 that has contributed significantly to the awareness of the observatory. Nevertheless, the use of the observatory by the few employees was insufficient. In 1985 the first holiday tours took place, which were mainly carried out by Holger Sturm and which were very successful. They are still carried out today with a slightly different concept. In September 1985, two amateur astronomers, Michael Vogel and Peter Paul Maurer, made contact with Holger Sturm. They visited the observatory and then criticized the work of the observatory and its disproportionate equipment. The result was a fruitful collaboration with many discussions about better use of the observatory. In 1985 Ulrich Arnold also joined the company as an employee. In the following, guided tours could be offered on Wednesdays and Fridays, and courses were also held at the adult education center for the first time.
In 1986, the idea of founding a sponsoring association came up to attract more employees . He should operate the Robert Mayer Observatory independently for the city of Heilbronn and make it usable for both schools and the public. The Robert-Mayer-Volks- und Schulsternwarte Heilbronn eV association was founded in February 1987 under the chairmanship of Holger Sturm.
Rotatable hollow globe
A hollow globe , the forerunner of modern projection planetariums , has been on the observatory's roof platform since the founding years . The hollow globe consists of a metal ball with a diameter of two meters, which is rotatably mounted on rollers and is also suspended on a stand. This allows you to easily set the current sky. Around 170 stars are marked by holes in the sphere, the diameter of the hole corresponding to the apparent brightness of the star. Sirius as the brightest star is symbolized by a 1.5 centimeter hole. All stars up to about 3.5 mag −20 ° declination are recorded .
The interior of the hollow globe is painted matt black so that you can draw in constellations , coordinate lines or the positions of planets with chalk . The hollow globe is one of the few devices that benefit from the RMS's location in the city center: it provides a very realistic image of the sky, especially when the sky is cloudy or the air is filled with water vapor. Around eight people can be comfortably in it at the same time, but there were already twice as many.
Nobody knows exactly how the hollow globe got to the observatory. All we know is that it existed when the observatory was founded: it was mentioned for the first time in the local council minutes of June 11, 1917. The Atwood celestial sphere (now in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago ) is regarded as a model for him today , but nothing more is known. The device is probably unique in Germany. In order to be able to continue using it in the future, it was renovated in 1992 by a locksmith in Heilbronn.
Due to strong weather conditions, urgent measures to preserve the hollow globe were necessary again in 2004. From September 2003, the hollow globe was closed to the public due to the construction work. Finally, in time for the observatory's 90th anniversary, the restoration work, which lasted almost a year, was completed by employees of the State Monuments Office. This ensures the continued existence of the hollow globe for many more years, so that it can now be used again in management operations.
Instruments
Coude refractor
General
On September 6, 1983, the Coudé refractor, financed exclusively by donations, was inaugurated. It was built by Carl Zeiss Jena and is now in the dome room.
operation area
In addition to its use in star tours, the Coudé is mainly used to observe the sun, moon and planets. The design that keeps the eyepiece firmly in place makes it the ideal guide telescope.
Technical specifications
Coudé refractor from Carl Zeiss Jena; Opening: 150 mm; Focal length: 2250 mm
C14
General
On April 21, 1995 the C14 was inaugurated as the new main unit of the RMS. It was also financed through donations. A CCD camera and computer control have been available for the C14 since the beginning of 1996.
operation area
Due to its light intensity, the C14 is ideally suited for deep sky observations. It is also used for CCD recordings and, if necessary, during guided tours, but is mainly used for members.
Technical specifications
Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope from Celestron ; Opening: 350 mm; Focal length: 3900 mm
C8
General
Opening and a very compact design are the greatest advantages of these two Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes.
operation area
The C8s are mainly set up for observation excursions into the Löwenstein Mountains , but also serve as a supplement to the fixed telescopes during star tours.
Technical specifications
Schmidt-Cassegrain from Celestron; Opening: 200 mm; Focal length: 2000 mm
Vixen 90mm refractor
General
In addition to the mobility, the very good image quality speaks in favor of the refractor, so that it has its justification alongside the more powerful C8 reflectors.
operation area
Originally the Vixen was bought for solar observation. Its good image quality justifies its use e.g. B. for planetary observation during observation excursions.
Technical specifications
Vixen refractor; Opening: 90 mm; Focal length: 1000 mm
In addition to the instruments presented here, the RMS also owns several historical telescopes from the time the observatory was founded, an Orion 80 / 600ED refractor, a mobile Celestron 80 / 600ED refractor, a variety of binoculars, camera adapters and cameras (analog and digital) for the Astrophotography, a CCD camera, a protuberance attachment and an H-alpha filter for solar observation and much more.
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 8 ′ 21.5 ″ N , 9 ° 13 ′ 37.5 ″ E