Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day three

Attendees of the Astronomical League conference were fortunate
enough to visit the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin
July 6. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

After an eight-year wait I finally got a look inside Yerkes Observatory, the University of Chicago facility in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. The intrepid travelers who are the attendees of the national conference of the Astronomical League visited Yerkes July 6, the third day of the conference.

My wait was eight years because in 2004 I attended another business conference just a hop and a skip away in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The observatory was closed during the entire time I was here, and I hadn’t had an excuse to pass through the area since. In fact, the Yerkes trip was one of the major draws of the conference for me.

Yerkes bills itself as “the birthplace of modern astrophysics.” It was founded in 1897 by George Ellery Hale and William Harper, president of the Univerisity of Chicago at the time, and financed by Chicago railroad magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. It was great to share the same space as some of the greats. Names who have worked at Yerkes include Hubble, Burnham, Barnard, Nichols, Ross, Struve, Morgan, Kuiper, Adams, and Wright. Einstein paid a visit to Yerkes in 1921. The 60-foot-long telescope with 40-inch lenses was the biggest refractor ever made for astronomy. Building bigger lenses just wasn’t practical. The Alvan Clark instrument makes the one in the UW’s Theodor Jacobsen Observatory look like a pipsqueak! Hale eventually lured many of the big names out west to look through even bigger reflecting scopes at Mt. Wilson.

The 40-inch Alvan Clark refractor, 60-feet long, is the biggest
refractor ever used successfully in astronomy. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It was super cool to visit Yerkes and soak in its history, and also to learn about some of the work being done there to improve the astronomy experience for the visually and hearing impaired.

The morning was filled with talks, including one by Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher, who also has been here blogging. You can read his dispatches of day one, day two, and day three and see if you think he’s having as much fun as I am!

After the Yerkes tour we went to Ravinia for an outdoor chamber music concert by the Emerson String Quartet, a star-b-que, and a bit of observing before heading back to HQ for a little shuteye. Had our timing been a little better we could have attended quite a contextually appropriate concert: The Chicago Symphony will perform “The Planets” by Gustav Holst on July 31.

Tonight the Astronomy Magazine Blues Band plays to highlight the ALCon banquet and awards ceremony.