February Meeting
Friday, February 6, 2015, 7:00 pm
From Backyard to Mountaintop: The Adventures of History's Best Worst Telescope
The 36-inch reflector of English amateur astronomer Andrew Common made its way from a London backyard to a Yorkshire estate and ultimately to a mountaintop observatory in California. This little-known telescope, built in 1879 and still operating today, revolutionized celestial photography and proved to 19th-century astronomers that the future of cosmic discovery lay in the camera, not the human eye.
Alan Hirshfeld, Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and an Associate of the Harvard College Observatory, is the author of Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday, Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes, and most recently, Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe. He is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal and has contributed to Sky & Telescope, the American Journal of Physics, BBC History Magazine, and American Scientist. He has made radio and television appearances and lectures nationwide about science history and discovery.
Alan Hirshfeld will bring copies of his book Starlight Detectives for those who wish to buy it. Or if they bring a copy of the book, he'd be happy to sign it.
