20th Century Telescope Designers and Manufacturers
Cave Optical - Unitron - Jaegers - Byers - Questar - Coulter - Edmond Scientific - Criterion - Celestron - Meade - Bernhard Schmidt
From Edwin Hubble to the Hubble Space Telescope & Beyond
Stephen Reb
Sidewalk refractor display - circa 1895
In the year 1900 few American homes had access to electricity. Fewer still had telephones. An average work weekwas 59 hours and the average weekly pay was $12.98. Many mainstream astronomers knew little of galaxies, the existance and nature of which were only recently described by Edwin Hubble following his research with the 100 inch Hooker Telescope at Mt. Plomar. Many other credible scientists of the day still harbored hopes that the surface of Mars was covered by an ancient system of canals.
By the turn of the next century, thirty years after the first human moon landing, it became possble for any middle class American citizen to own a computerized telescope with location coordinates for some 50,000 stars, nebulae and galaxies. Digital astro-photography still involved a substantial learning curve, but prices for the sort of equipment necessary to produce professional quality astonomy images was now within the range of the common man.
Go-To or not Go-To
The development of computerized, motor driven setting circles (go-to telescopes) could not have been more timely, coinciding with the latter stages of America's urbanization. Within a few short decades America went from a largely agrarian society to a nation of city dwellers. By the 1920s most people had never see more than a handful of stars strewn accross the night sky.
Until recently amateur star gazers navigated the sky by means of "star hopping" from one bright, known object to another, finally coming to rest at the celestial coordinates of the target object. This had become increasingly difficult with the spread of gaslamps, then electric streetlights and the electric illumination of millions of homes and businesses. The only prerequisite for star hopping is having stars to hop to and from. Unfortunately, as of the 2000 U.S. census report, only 20% of the population inhabit rural areas. For most people the sky at 10:00 p.m. is a mass of slightly orange tinted gray through which one to two hundred stars might shine through on an unusually dark night.
20th Century Optical Engineers
John F. Gregory - Tom Cave - Bernhard Schmidt - Thomas M. Back - Roland Christen - Henri Chrétien - George Ritchey -
The Popularization of Space
The latter half of the twentieth century saw significant increases in the public's interest in both astronomy, and in speculation regarding the possibility of intelegent life beyond our planet. Ordinarily I don't associate astronomy with UFO research. Like many people I sometimes wonder about the latter, but at the same time I have to feel that a more important question, or at least a more practical one, would be: What is the chemical makeup of the nebulae within our galactic group. Why is this a more important question? If for no other reason, then because we are reasonably certain that the objects cataloged by Messier really do exist. And, though it may be a safe bet that inteligent life exists elsewhere, we've never seen it. On the other hand, we do know that the two galactic components of M51 exist, because on a good night my 12" reflector clearly resolves them.
continued very soon... 12/22/2010