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The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
located on
Observatory Hill in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, is a joint enterprise of the
Harvard College Observatory and the
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Our telescopes are mostly elsewhere--
Mt. Hopkins, Arizona;
Las Campanas, Chile;
Mauna Kea, Hawaii;
The South Pole;
and in space--but
there some historically interesting facilities in Cambridge.
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The Great Refractor
This 15-inch telescope known as "The Great Refractor" was installed at Cambridge in
1847. For 20 years it was the largest telescope in the United States, the most
significant American astronomical instrument and equal to the finest in the world. It
formed the nucleus for development of the Harvard College Observatory.
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The Harvard College Observatory Astronomical Plate Stacks
There are over 500,000 glass photographic plates in the Harvard Plate stacks,
exposed in both the northern and southern hemispheres between 1885 and 1993.
This 100 year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations
in the universe.
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DASCH: Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard
To scan that many plates, we built a specialized scanner funded by a grant
from the National Science Foundation.
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