400 Years of the Telescope

Following our Monday visit to the Lick Observatory, we decided to do some research regarding the history of the site. As we dug deeper and deeper into the historical archives of Lick, we found some interesting location facts and historical figures that we thought should be shared.

As you now know, the Lick Observatory is home to the world’s second largest lens-type telescope, the 36-inch Clark refractor. The world-renowned astronomer, Edward Emerson (“E.E.”) Barnard, was an observer and photographer at Lick after the observatory opened in the late 1880’s. To this day, Barnard is considered one of the finest visual astronomical observers of all time, and a pioneer in the use of telescopes and lenses for astronomical photography.

Born in 1857, Barnard grew up in Nashville, TN during the Civil War. His father died when Edward was very young. Raised by his mother in a very poor home environment, Edward was essentially self-educated. He did attend Vanderbilt University as a young man. His interests turned to two pursuits at an early age that would serve him well throughout his lifetime. One was visual observations with small refracting telescopes; the other was photography. After the war Edward worked for a time for a local photographer in Nashville. A little later, he began his celebrated observing and photographic career at the Vanderbilt University Observatory.

At Vanderbilt in the 1870’s and 1880’s, Barnard made thousands of recorded observations of all types of celestial objects and events from a solar eclipse, to the rings of Saturn, to the Great Red Spot on the planet Jupiter, to what are today known collectively as “deep sky objects” – star clusters, gaseous nebulae, and “spiral nebulae” – the latter of which we now call galaxies. He discovered several comets during this time. Barnard caught the attention of professional astronomers from around the country and the world for his keen observing abilities and beautifully detailed drawings of the objects he viewed through telescopes. While he continued to make hand sketches of his observations in notebooks his entire life, it was his love of photographing through the telescope that made Barnard especially famous.

In 1887 he and his wife Rhoda moved from Nashville to Mount Hamilton, the location of the Lick Observatory. It was at Lick that Barnard greatly sharpened his observing and photography skills beneath the often pristine skies of Mount Hamilton. In 1888 Edward started the first of what would be thousands more observations and drawings, and began taking the first of thousands of photographic plates with the Lick 12-inch and 36-inch refractors. The 36-inch refractor was, at the time, the world’s largest working telescope, and Barnard observed and photographed with it nearly every night the sky was clear.

Among his many important observations, Barnard made a significant discovery in 1892 with the 36-inch Lick refractor by identifying the fifth moon of Jupiter, later called Amalthea. The first four Jovian moons, Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede are collective called the “Galilean Satellites” in honor of Galileo who first observed them with his early telescope in 1609 and correctly identified them as orbiting about the planet. Barnard was the first person in over 280 years to discover a new moon around Jupiter. Today, with the benefit of sophisticated electronic imaging and massive telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, and numerous visits by spacecraft, astronomers have identified at least 63 moons orbiting Jupiter. Most of these moons are far too small and faint to see with ground-based instruments.

Edward left the Lick Observatory in 1895 and headed east once again, this time to work as a visual observer and photographer at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, WI, home of the largest refracting telescope ever built – the 40-inch Clark. The telescope is owned and operated to this day by the University of Chicago. Edward worked there until his death in 1923.

Barnard is probably best known for his famous detailed photographs of the Milky Way. He published three volumes in total of his Milky Way photos. The first set was taken at Lick with a six-inch diameter lens attached to a special telescope during his tenure on Mt. Hamilton. The pictures were finally published in 1913 as the eleventh volume of the Publications of the Lick Observatory. The book includes some photos of comets. The second group of photos was taken at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in southern California in the early part of the 20th century with a special photographic telescope designed specifically for that purpose. Barnard was a notorious perfectionist. He was disappointed with the reproductions of his Lick photos even after many attempts over almost 20 years to print high-quality copies. While he wanted desperately to publish his Mt. Wilson photographs he insisted that the reproductions be as true to the originals as possible. Edward worked tirelessly for years with various printers in and around the Chicago area to perfect techniques that would achieve his goals. The result was a stunningly beautiful two-volume set known as An Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, unfortunately published in 1927, well after Barnard’s death. It was a ground-breaking work and created a standard for future astrophotographers to achieve. Only 500 sets of the Atlas were printed and most landed in college, university and observatory libraries. Occasionally today sets will become available for sale, usually at prices starting around $5,000.

Knowing about the history and the shared experiences of so many scientists, past and present, has helped to enrich our appreciation of the Observatory and we hope that it will do the same for you.