Object Details
- used at
- Vassar College
- Mitchell, Maria
- Fitz, Jr., Henry
- Fitz, Harry
- Clark, Alvan
- Warner & Swasey Company
- Description
- Vassar College was established as a school for women at Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1861. Like many other American colleges of the period, it had a well-equipped astronomical observatory. Its primary telescope, an equatorial refractor of 12½ inches aperture, was made by Henry Fitz, Jr., America’s first successful commercial telescope maker. Its first professor of astronomy was Maria Mitchell, America’s first woman astronomer and first woman scientist of note. In the mid-1860s, Mitchell asked Alvan Clark to rework the large objective lens and also the drive mechanism. Warner & Swasey built a new mount in the 1880s. Vassar donated this historic telescope to the Smithsonian in 1963.
- Ref: Deborah Warner and Robert Ariail, Alvan Clark & Sons. Artists in Optics (Richmond, 1995), pp. 170-173.
- Credit Line
- Vassar College
- 1863
- ID Number
- PH.323566.1
- catalog number
- 323566
- accession number
- 248757
- Object Name
- telescope (objective)
- telescope
- telescope, refracting
- Physical Description
- walnut veneer (overall material)
- brass (polar circle material)
- brass (eyepiece material)
- glass (eyepiece material)
- mahogany (case material)
- leather (seat material)
- See more items in
- Medicine and Science: Physical Sciences
- Science & Mathematics
- National Museum of American History
- Subject
- Astronomy
- Education
- Record ID
- nmah_1185541
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746aa-46dd-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa
