Dear Friends,
I just discovered this nice thread with kind words that includes pictures of the place I have in Magdalena, New Mexico, a village of about 700 people near the VLA radio telescope. I'm sorry I didn't see the thread to comment earlier. Yes indeed, friends and I have something of a telescope museum here. By most standards our location is remote. The building is a 1936 WPA project school gymnasium, about 7,500 square feet, that had been inactive about five years before I got it some three years ago. It has a stage and several large side rooms. We call it "The Astronomical Lyceum." Sometimes local artists have described it in a more grandiose phrase, but "Astronomical Lyceum" is what we call it. The building serves as a headquarters for the young Magdalena Astronomical Society, Inc. MAS now runs the annual Enchanted Skies Star Party, still a relatively small event after 25 years, but growing and beginning to draw folks from across the country. For the first time this year the ESSP lecture series ran at the Lyceum. A team of about 12 local people collaborate to make ESSP happen. This year we had an especially nice participation from the Albuquerque Astronomical Society, an amazingly active and excellent group based 100 miles away.
I'm currently president of the Antique Telescope Society, a membership of about 200 that has also been running a quarter century now. I've collected instruments, books, and related artifacts since about 1980, and as a kid I was strongly influenced by cool historic observatories in New England. I was very lucky to first attend Stellafane in 1971 as a young teenager. It changed my life!
The skies are wonderfully dark here, and I have a hilltop called FOAH Observatory that, hopefully within a year, will expand to house for a great 24-inch Boller & Chivens telescope formerly at UNM's Capilla Peak Observatory. I'm in semi-retirement having worked in a variety of technical capacities for different observatories and organizations across the country, most often as an instrumentation engineer. I still do consulting and whatever I can, and my current project is with JPL. When I bragged to my telescope buddies about having found the Lyceum where I could unpack and build a workshop, some of them retaliated. Guys said something like, "OK, Briggs -- now you have lots of space, so now I'm going to GIVE you all MY garage stuff, and YOU have to deal with it!" Honestly, this has actually happened. So my huge space has filled much more quickly and wonderfully than I ever imagined. And we are really trying to use & preserve very cool stuff in educational ways.
We have one side room as an electronics lab and another as a machine shop. All too recently we got a rest room working and a "powder room" decorated. The stage lights are running, and we can seat fifty people below the stage with a new podium and an excellent BENQ theater projector. We have a surprising collection of interesting large optics and space for optical testing. We're working to mount a 37-inch Dobsonian primary owned by Wheaton College of Massachusetts in a telescope we're calling the "Wheatonian." We large number of historic telescopes waiting to get out of the current warehouse-like situation and in use under the sky. We have a large library of astronomy and related topics, with a special emphasis on history, celestial mechanics, optical engineering, and American popular astronomy journals. We also have two mirror coating chambers, the most recent acquisition surplus from JPL's Table Mountain Observatory and designed to handle a 48-inch.
The Lyceum's most recent major acquisition, however, was the complete journal & publication collection from Swarthmore College's shuttered Sproul Observatory, a well-known research institution that operated over a century. The collection -- newly shelved at the Lyceum within just the last two weeks -- involves about 3 1/2 tons of astronomy journals and publications, some of which are over 200 years old! The collection was a gift from the College. We had little prior connection with them beyond our expressed willingness to move and preserve the collection at our own expense. The library is an amazing archive of late 19th through 20th century international astronomy, including old-school astrometric research, and also, perhaps most importantly, of the rise of astrophysics.
But beyond the huge library expansion, the most important local development of all in the last year has been the arrival of Eric Toops from Atlanta, Georgia. Eric is an accomplished electronics engineer and award-winning solar photographer. He has bought an 18,000-square-foot school building adjoining the Lyceum and is currently refurbishing it into an astronomical laboratory, residence, and observatory with an emphasis on optics and electro-optical technology. With him, members of Magdalena Astronomical Society feel sure to make great progress. Amazing things are still possible in New Mexico.
Anyone interested to see the Lyceum collection and to enjoy the local dark skies should feel free to contact me anytime. The collection includes samples of telescope work from almost all the famous American makers and a number of European ones as well. The collection includes photographs, glass plates, related historical instruments like measuring engines, and instruments & artifacts related to heroic American astronomers like Barnard, Hale, Ritchey, and Tombaugh. Some remarkable ATM projects are represented as well. The presentation remains curiously informal, but we are working hard to organize. Dr. Dan Klinglesmith, a recent co-discoverer of three binary asteroids, serves as the Lyceum's librarian.
--John W. Briggs,
FOAH Observatory and Astronomical Lyceum,
Magdalena, New Mexico.
