The Universe from the Center: This year we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Keeble Observatory

DR. GEORGE SPAGNA Special to The Local

The Keeble Observatory at Randolph-Macon College will hold public viewing on Thursday evenings, 7 to 9 p.m. into mid-May. These sessions depend on weather – if skies are cloudy they will not open. For more information check their website (www.rmc.edu/ Keeble), Instagram page (https://www.instagram. com/keebleobservatory) or call the information line (804-752-3210).

2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the Keeble Observatory, which opened in

1963. But it did not mark the beginning of astronomy education at Randolph-Macon, rather a continuation of a long tradition which dates to the 19th century. I’d like to take this and the next few columns to describe that history.

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Signupviaemailat hailey.holmes@vtecinc.org lege (R-MC, the College) is a college of the liberal arts and sciences in Ashland, Virginia. Originally founded in 1830 in Boydton, Virginia the College moved to Ashland after the Civil War in 1868.

The classical liberal arts, going back to the time of Plato, consisted of the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) and the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric). In the Republic Plato states that students should engage with the Quadrivium after learning to “move gracefully” before moving on to the higher disciplines of the Trivium. Yet the first mention of astronomy at R-MC doesn’t appear in the College Catalog until 1872, four years after the move to Ashland. This course was offered as part of what we would now call the senior curriculum.

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The Catalog notes that the course was taught using an “excellent refracting telescope of 5 ¼ inch aperture.” The 1887 Catalog moves the course to the “Intermediate Level” and again explicitly mentions that refracting telescope. That telescope — which is signed on the eyepiece mechanism by “John Byrne – New York” has been restored and is on display in the Copley Science Center near the current Observatory entrance. There is no record of its purchase in the Treasurer’s ledgers or of a gift in the minutes of the Board of Trustees, so it’s currently unclear how the College acquired the telescope.

In 1890 the Catalog cel- ebrates the opening of a new Science Hall located on the railroad tracks on the site of the circular driveway near the modern Mary Branch Hall. A feature of the new building, subsequently named Pettyjohn Hall, was an astronomical observatory gifted by a Mrs. Lutz who had been the wife of a Trustee. A list of the instruments available to the Lutz Observatory includes the same telescope! Here we find a further notation that the telescope had been “worked over by Alvan Clarke & Sons.” An entry in the Treasurer’s ledger shows that Clarke was paid $62 for the work.

Alvan Clarke & Sons were premier telescope builders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and every telescope they ever built or worked on is documented in a book (“Alvan Clarke & Sons – artists in optics”) published by the Smithsonian Institution. You can also look them up on Wikipedia.

Lunar phases for May: Full Moon on the 5th, at 1:34 pm — There will be a penumbral lunar eclipse at this time, obviously not visible from central Virginia; Last Quarter on the 12th, at 10:28 am – this is visible to the southwest; New Moon on the 19th at 11:53 am; and First Quarter on the 27th at 11:22 am. All times are Eastern Daylight.

Mercury returns as the pre-dawn “morning star” at mid-month. Look for it low to the east. It reaches its greatest western elongation on the 29th. You’ll see Jupiter above and to the right (it rises about 5:00 am), and if you follow that line toward the southeast you should see Saturn even higher about 45 degrees away. Venus is bright to the southwest at evening twilight, setting around midnight. Mars sets at 1 a.m.

Please see UNIVERSE, Page 9