McCormick Observatory is a historic landmark on par with the Rotunda and Alderman Library, but unlike those UVA icons, it’s easy to miss. At the end of a narrow, winding road up Mount Jefferson, the 120-year-old domed structure is like some archaic ruin far from civilization.
Indeed, little has changed at the observatory, home to a 32-foot telescope still equipped with 26-inch lenses from the 1870s and other charming anachronisms such as a huge wooden ladder-chair with a seat adjusted by ropes that can also make it rotate around the room. “Kids are impressed by the telescope, but they love this chair,” says Ed Murphy, a UVA professor and the facility’s primary supervisor. “They don’t make things like that anymore.” The same can be said for the ancient mounted camera that was used for research in 1914.
The dome slits that allow the scope to peruse the night sky are still smoothly rope-operated, in the manner of a stage curtain, and even though astronomers may now press a button to rotate the dome, it still rests on the same iron and wheels on which it was installed and once turned by hand-crank. It could be a century ago in this cavernous space but for a few digital clocks and twisting wires.
The old-fashioned look is no accident. Murphy wants to restore McCormick to its original 1885 appearance and his efforts at public outreach have already landed some huge lifts. Local businessman and amateur astronomer Robert Capon and his wife, Rose, donated $20,000. “Our gift was designed to be a catalyst,” says Robert Capon. “Money so that we could really break ground on the project and people could see that it could be a reality.”
It’s working: The Perry Foundation, a local philanthropy, recently pledged $230,000—a challenge grant that depends on Murphy and the University securing $305,000 by December. Perhaps Mc-Cormick’s extensive and long-standing public outreach will be a key ingredient in the restoration project.
Though UVA has an astronomy department, the observatory owes a lot of its public profile to its twice-monthly public nights, UVA’s longest ongoing outreach program, held continuously since the facility opened in 1885 on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13.
Then there’s the other aspect of the observatory’s public appeal. For the past five years, Murphy has been in a unique position at UVA—he is the astronomy department’s education and public outreach coordinator, a rare calling in academia. In that time, he has taken public participation to a new high. Nearly every day McCormick is busy with visiting classes from area elementary schools, while during the summer the astronomy department now runs courses for K-12 teachers on how to teach astronomy.
Murphy has bigger plans, too. Next door to the observatory is a vacant building, Alden House, once home to observatory directors. It is here that Murphy would like to develop a science outreach center for UVA, a place where the kind of educational programs he puts on for astronomy could be coordinated for all the sciences, including engineering and medicine. “Space at the university is critical, there are science departments with desks crammed in hallways,” he says. “And here is a big empty building ideally suited to our purposes.” There’s only one glitch: It will take about $3 million to fully fund renovations of both buildings and another $3 million endowment to support a science center staff.
Murphy, at 6’8" is at McCormick in some measure because of the disadvantages of height. Having wanted to become an astronaut since he was 10, Murphy was told by his high school military recruiter that he was too tall to become a pilot, the requisite first step for that profession. So Murphy turned to the next best path as a space lover: astronomy. He attended graduate school at UVA, where he first fell in love with McCormick; he began building his extensive mental database of McCormick trivia while volunteering to help with the public nights.
On public nights, astronomers pick a particular object as focus—in 2003, when Mars was as close to the Earth as it has ever been in recorded history, public nights drew thousands of visitors and kept the observatory open until 4am.
Around 50 people—couples, families and curious loners—show up to a recent, somewhat cloudy public night to view the Orion Nebula. As only one at a time can view the star cluster, Murphy engages those waiting by talking about the Orion Nebula with a few supporting laptop images and an excellent command of facts, rattling off precise numbers for how long light takes to get to the sun and the length of time for a probe to get to Pluto. Throughout the demonstration, a few eager kids ask hyper-specific questions about radio-wave telescopes, distant comet clusters and Mars Rovers. Murphy, clearly a fan of the esoteric, nevertheless takes these basic queries with enthusiasm.
No offense to Murphy, but without a doubt the big thrill of a public night is looking through the telescope. A high school student volunteer, Rolando Mendez, assists viewers and rotates the chair to follow the telescope, which automatically tracks a set point once it’s locked in place. “I thought it was weird how the stars were green,” says Catherine, a seventh-grade visitor. That appearance comes from the prism effect of the lens, which, because of its slight curvature, brings the yellowish-blue light to focus rather than the red or blue light. Or as a sixth-grader named Zack puts it, “It made it appear so close, but then I thought about it, and there’s no way it’s that close at all.”
The astronomy faculty each take a turn helping at the observatory during the year, and on this particular night Professor Craig Sarazin has just finished his talk “Gamma Ray Bursts: An Astronomical Mystery Story,” for those done or waiting to look through the telescope. “Things get so hectic, it seems like a chore,” Sarazin says, “until you get up here and remember how fun it is. I’m reminded how lucky I am to be paid to do my hobby.”
The beginnings of astronomy at UVA start—where else?—with Thomas Jefferson. In his myriad schemes for the University, TJ drew up plans for an observatory, bought a fine London sidereal clock, and even composed designs for a proto-planetarium in the Rotunda’s ceiling. Unfortunately, as in other aspects of his life, his dreams exceeded his funds. Instead, it took the wealth and initiative of a former Virginia planter turned successful Chicago businessman, Leander McCormick, to create an observatory for UVA.
McCormick, whose family had acquired their wealth by inventing and marketing the mechanical reaper, came with no Jeffersonian love of science and astronomy, but with the jealous desire to one-up a social equal: His pledge to donate the largest telescope in the world to his native state of Virginia came on the heels of a fellow Chicagoan’s donation of an 18" telescope, largest in the world, to the University of Chicago.
In 1870, McCormick asked Robert E. Lee if Washington University (soon to be Washington and Lee) was interested in the telescope. Lee, sensing that McCormick’s stipulation that the university must raise an astronomy endowment would be too much for his cash-strapped institution, directed McCormick to UVA, thinking that as a state university it might have better access to funding. Though unable to secure State funds, UVA rallied the alumni for nearly $75,000 to endow a professorship for a director and provide necessary funds to run the observatory and hire assistants.
Though the process was stalled throughout the 1870s due to the 1871 Chicago fire that burned the McCormick factory to the ground, in the end UVA got the largest telescope in the United States and second largest in the world. Many people believe that this was one of the finest refractors ever built by prominent lenscrafters Alvan Clark and Sons, who, by the way, constructed the lens for many observatories, including Dearborn and the Naval Observatory.
It was this excellent telescope that for almost 80 years worked to calculate the distances to stars [see sidebar below] and helped build UVA into a top astronomy program. But as light pollution increased in Charlottesville and telescope technology improved, the astronomy department shifted its major research to a new facility, Fan Mountain, located 20 miles south of Charlottesville. There it built two larger and more sophisticated telescopes. Finally in the mid 1990s, all research ceased at McCormick.
Even now, though, the facility continues to be in use virtually every night. It is still the primary training site for undergraduate astronomy students, with some graduate students also doing training operations there. Remaining nights are booked with various classes, local astronomy clubs and, of course, its public nights.
Murphy has further exploited McCor-mick as a resource, particularly serving the K-12 teachers with instruction that gets high marks. “The course was dead on the money,” says Charlie Cox, a high school astronomy teacher in Waynesboro. “It was exactly what teachers need: You get the latest information of what’s going on, it’s explained in a manner that’s easy to take in, and the best part is that they give you tools so that you can do hands on things during the day, you don’t necessarily have to wait for night.”
Diana Amatucci, a teacher at Stony Point Elementary who for several years has been bringing her fourth grade classes to McCormick, had high praise for Murphy’s daytime lessons. “It was an incredible day—students have an opportunity to see a real scientist from the real world. It’s a fantastic place for children to be just to see simple machines in action: gears and pulleys and levers and balances and wheels. Kids are never bored.”
Murphy’s outreach agenda addresses some of UVA’s far-reaching goals. About five years ago, UVA’s 2020 Commission noted that the University “lacks clear priorities for public service and outreach” and “does not partner with the public effectively as it could.” It explicitly mentioned the need to strengthen UVA’s commitment to K-12 education. So when Murphy came up with the idea of a science center geared to the K-12 teachers, it had immediate appeal.
“This science center is by far the most ambitious step we’ve taken as far at the University’s 2020 plan for outreach and public service,” says Laura Hawthorne, director of University outreach. “Science is clearly a public need. It seems like every time you turn around there’s another report about how this country is falling behind in terms of its math, science and engineering. So the public need combined with strong faculty interest combined with the opportunity of being able to renovate a historic space here on Grounds, were pieces that came together to make this the right priority for us to focus on.”
But one problem the science center will inevitably face if it relies on State and University budgets, is dependable yearly flow necessary to maintain a stable staff. “The lesson that we see over and over again is that core support for these centers is hard to sustain if you don’t have an endowment,” says Hawthorne. “Even the programs that have been very successful [at other institutions] are still struggling with that basic question of, ‘Are we going to be able to pay our people next year?’ We don’t want that to be an issue here.”
UVA hopes to raise private money to endow the programming and the core staffing of the center for a long time to come, but to do that, the University must find ways to engage donors for such a purpose.
“Raising money for public engagement is a new kind of money for us,” says Hawthorne. “There may be untapped pools of alumni out there who care deeply about these issues, but we’ve never put them on the table in this way before. My hunch, especially based on conversations with young alumni of means, is that these issues resonate deeply with them.”
For now, it remains only a hunch: the University has made little financial commitment as of yet to Murphy’s project and is still working out a strategy with Murphy to raise during the next nine months the $305,000 in matching funds that the Perry Foundation mandates.
But while surely Ed Murphy is eager to have the money pledged as soon as possible—while he more than anyone has his own personal vision staked to this idea—perhaps he, as an astronomer, knows as well as anyone the vanity of the works and days of hands. An exhibit at the museum portion of the observatory displays boxes highlighting the work that UVA people are doing on studying the formation of the solar system. The exhibit traces the history of gold atoms from the initial formation of stars to gold finding a place near the Earth’s surface.
“People don’t realize it, but we’re made of stuff that comes from suns. We literally do come from the stars. But more importantly for people to realize, that’s where we’re going to go back.”
HOW FAR TO THE NEXT STAR?
McCormick was a leader in parallax
After the McCormick Observatory was built in the late 1800s, the first director, Ormond Stone, used the new telescope to study whether nebula in the southern sky change over time. They do—but, unfortunately for Stone, the changes are too slow to be noticed during a human lifetime, and so his work with nebulae was in vain. Oh, the perils of science!
McCormick’s next director, Samual Alfred Mitchell, had better luck. His use of the telescope to judge the distance to stars began in 1914 and put UVA astronomy on the map for the next 80 years. By the time satellites took over that work, astronomers used telescopes to judge the distance to 10,000 stars—about a third of those distances were figured at UVA.
In order to know the fundamental properties of a star (size, mass, the amount of energy it produces), we must know how far away they are from Earth. To know how far away a star is, astronomers use a method of calculation called “parallax.”
Parallax is the same process by which we, as humans, use our two eyes to judge distance to objects. By looking at the same thing from two perspectives, we intuitively determine distance. Try it yourself: Hold out your thumb and look at it through one eye, then the other. The greater the difference in the perspectives, the closer the object; the smaller the difference, the farther away. Because the earth revolves around the sun, astronomers can take advantage of this principle by looking at a star in six-month intervals, when we have the greatest difference in perspective. Nearby stars appear to wobble in the sky, not because the stars are moving, but because we are going around the sun. Astronomers can estimate the distance to the stars by measuring the size of that wobble.
Though astronomers since the ancient Greeks have known of this principle, it takes very good telescopes to make accurate measurements. Mitchell mounted a camera on his telescope so he could take photographs of the stars, and his original 1914 camera still resides in McCormick. Throughout the eight decades that UVA conducted the parallax program, McCormick accumulated glass plate photographs of the night sky almost every night.
Several factors brought the parallax program to a halt in the 1990s. The light pollution in Charlottesville grew increasingly worse, distorting the photographs. Kodak had decided not to manufacture glass plates because there wasn’t enough demand for them—digital cameras had become very popular. The program died when astronomers started using satellites to do the work.
Yet UVA astronomy is still in business. Research continues at Fan Mountain, where UVA has two research telescopes 20 miles south of the city. And thanks to a $10 million donation from alumnus Frank Levinson and his wife, the astronomy department has partnered with the University of Arizona to build a large binocular telescope on Arizona’s Mount Graham, so that UVA can have a share in observing time at a topnotch facility—the primary draw for an astronomy department.—W.G.