 Leitner Family Observatory. | |||||
| Alternative names | Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium | ||||
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| Organization | Yale University | ||||
| Location | New Haven, Connecticut,USA | ||||
| Coordinates | 41°19′16″N72°55′19″W / 41.3210°N 72.9220°W /41.3210; -72.9220 | ||||
| Altitude | 38 m (125 ft) | ||||
| Established | 1830 | ||||
| Website | leitnerobservatory.yale.edu | ||||
| Telescopes | |||||
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  Location of Yale University Observatory | |||||
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TheYale University Observatory, also known as theLeitner Family Observatory and Planetarium, is anastronomicalobservatory owned and operated byYale University, and maintained for student use. It is located inFarnham Memorial Gardens near the corner of Edwards and Prospect Streets,New Haven,Connecticut.
In the 21st century, the Yale Student Observatory, the Leitner observatory also has public outreaches and supports astronomy for students of the college. However, the Yale Observatory traces its history back to being one of the first formal institutions for astronomical observation in the United States, dating to the 1830s.
In 1828 Sheldon Clark donated 1200 US dollars to Yale to procure a Dollond refracting telescope.[1]
Yale's firstobservatory, the Atheneum, was founded in 1830, situated in a tower. From 1830 it housed Yale's firstrefractor, a 5-inch (130 mm)Dollond donated bySheldon Clark. It was the largest in the United States at the time. With this telescopeOlmsted andElias Loomis made the first American sighting of the return ofHalley's Comet on 31 August 1835.[2] (It had been seen in Europe on 6 August, but no news of this had reached the United States.) The telescope was mounted on casters and moved from window to window, but it could not reachaltitudes much over 30 deg above thehorizon.
In 1870, a cylindrical turret was added above the tower, so that all altitudes could be reached. In the same year a 9-inch Alvan Clark refractor was mounted in the observatory. The building was demolished in 1893 and the telescope is now at theSmithsonian Institution inWashington, D.C.
The observatory, in the turret (modelled after the gun turret of the ironclad shipUSSMonitor), housed a 9-inch (230 mm)Alvan Clarkrefractor donated byJoseph E. Sheffield. The telescope was later housed in the dome on Bingham Hall (the dome later converted to a smallplanetarium, and now used as an experimentalaquarium).
An 8-inch (200 mm) telescope financed by E.M. Reed ofNew Haven was first used for photographing theSun during theTransit of Venus on December 6, 1882.
The observatory also possessed aheliometer, ordered fromRepsold and Sons by H. A. Newton in 1880, delivered in time for measurements of theTransit of Venus on December 6, 1882 for determination ofsolar parallax. This is the same type of instrument thatFriedrich Bessel used in 1838 for the first significant determination of astellar parallax (of the star61 Cygni). Under the direction ofW. L. Elkin from 1883 to 1910 the heliometer yielded (according toFrank Schlesinger) the most (238) and the best parallaxes obtained before the advent ofphotographicastrometry.
In the late 1890s, W. L. Elkin built two batteries ofcameras equipped with rotatingshutters for obtaining thevelocities as well as the heights ofmeteors, pioneering work in the study of meteors.[3]
The Loomis Tower on Canner Street, erected in 1923 in memory of Elias Loomis (1811–1889), was at the time the largest polar telescope in America. The installation was originally designed for the comfort of the observer who sat at theeyepiece in a warm room at the top of the tower. The tube (beneath the stairs) was parallel to thepolar axis of theEarth. The building at the base of the tower had a sliding roof and housed a 30-inch (760 mm)optical flatcoelostatmirror driven equatorially andreflecting light from any unobscured part of the sky through both a 15-inch (380 mm)photographic and a 10-inch (250 mm)visualguide telescope, both of the samefocal length, 600 inches.
In 1945, the telescope was reversed, with the 15-inch (380 mm) objective at the top, the plate holder at the foot of the tube. The telescope was thus rigidly mounted for photographing the polar region only, for the purpose of investigating the wobbling of the axis of rotation of the Earth and redetermining the constants ofprecession andnutation.
The Loomis Telescope was moved toBethany, Connecticut in 1957, to continue monitoring the apparent motion of the axis of the Earth. Carol Williams analyzed plates for her Ph.D. thesis, 1967. She found apparent motions largely correlated withtidal disturbances of theEarth's crust.
The observatory was renamed as the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium in 2008. The observatory now uses a refurbished 8-inch Reed refractor for visual observations of planets and stars. It also includes two Ash domes housing a 16"RCOS telescope and a refurbishedrefractor from theGrubb Telescope Company (originally purchased to observe the 1882 transit of Venus). Detectors include anSBIG ST-9E CCD camera and aDSS-7 spectrograph. There is anobserving deck between the domes. The observatory also houses a digital planetarium theater, which uses a Spitz SciDomeHD projection system.
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