Dudley Observatory wants to put telescope up for public viewing

PHOTOGRAPHER: Peter R. Barber

Janie Schwab, exectutive director of the Dudley Observatory at 107 Nott Terrace in Schenectady, places one of the spotting scopes of the Pruyn telescope onto a table last week.

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A year ago, the stars were almost within reach.

After 32 years, Dudley Observatory was about to have an actual observatory again. But at the last minute, the Dudley board backed out of the deal. While they wanted to return to urban stargazing, they felt the price was too high.

“We were going to have to abandon the research [library] — put away the library but get a telescope,” said Janie Schwab, executive director. “At that point, the board realized we have to do both.”

Dudley Observatory, now located at Schaffer Heights on Nott Terrace, is a national repository for letters, journals and astronomy books written as much as four centuries before the first satellite was blasted into space. Schwab has astronomer Percival Lowell’s journal, in which he first writes about his observations of Mars a century ago and slowly comes to the false conclusion that he must be seeing artificially constructed canals. She also has the letters sent back and forth from the United States and Argentina as astronomers measured the movement of the stars in the Southern Hemisphere, a painstaking process that led to the discovery of the Milky Way Galaxy.

While most of the discoveries in the Dudley library have either been long proven false or overshadowed by the more recent images from spacecraft and the Hubble Telescope, Schwab still uses the old books to inspire classrooms of students to become true scientists.

“People have an image of scientists as people in the lab in white coats working through step by step to the right answer,” Schwab said. “It is so different from the labs you do in school. In real science you don’t know what the right answer is. You can read why Lowell thought there were canals on Mars — you can see the drawings and there’s all the reasoning behind it.”

The journals and letters at her library also offer a glimpse of the human side of scientists who are now summarized in history textbooks.

“It goes through explicitly how Lowell did the experiments, and the excitement. In articles and all the official things, you’re not going to get that excitement,” she said.

starting over

Her board is now convinced, so they’re restarting their search for an observatory location. This time, they’ll only consider spaces big enough for a telescope and the library.

In the meantime, Schwab had gathered an army of experts to help restart the oldest state observatory, which was founded in Albany in 1852.

For more than a century, the observatory was at the center of pivotal astronomical discoveries. But private observatories grew in prominence and funding for Dudley declined, so in 1976 researchers packed away the observatory’s powerful telescope. They decided to focus on astronomy education and set up a museum with the observatory equipment. It moved several times before opening in Schaffer Heights.

The Dudley board doesn’t intend to rejoin the astronomical research world with the new observatory. The focus will remain on public education, and Schwab hopes the facility will become a popular place for amateur stargazing.

In preparation, leaders of the Antique Telescope Society inspected the observatory’s 115-year-old Pruyn Telescope recently. Schwab was prepared for a long list of needed repairs.

To her surprise, the telescope that had spent the last four decades in boxes in the state museum warehouse was in nearly perfect condition.

“It’s in much better shape than I thought it was,” Schwab said.

Although it’s more than a century old, amateur astronomers would be able to see any planetary body in the Solar System, even the far-away Uranus and Neptune.

“It would be a phenomenal instrument for public viewing,” Schwab said. “Looking at Saturn though any telescope is a phenomenal experience, but looking through one of these telescopes is very different from one of the modern refractors. These telescopes were works of art.”

Refurbishing the entire, 15-foot-long refractor would only cost about $1,500, she learned. But the agency got a third of the work donated by the company that originally made the telescope’s lenses, and the rest of the cost will be covered by a member item from Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Schenectady). His grant will pay for a company to oil and clean the mechanical clock drive that was used to track planets and stars as they moved through the sky, long before electricity made that job easy. The drive moves the telescope incrementally over time, similar to the way a grandfather clock mechanism moves the clock’s hands.

It will take just a few months for the drive to be cleaned. Then Schwab will be ready to reassemble the “really big honkin’ telescope” and point it out an observatory window.

If only she had a place to put it.

“The search will start this year,” she said, but added that she has no idea how long it will take. The observatory board will consider any building in a central urban area that is “relatively dark.” They’re looking in all four Capital District cities.

Schwab’s rooting for a historic house. She thinks it would be the perfect place for the observatory’s antique telescopes.

“We certainly have a lot of historic things,” she said.