Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona, a non-profit astronomical and educational institute is building a new $4M public outreach observatory that will house six permanently mounted telescopes, a classroom and a telescope storage and workshop area.
Construction is well underway and we have a planned grand opening date of September 14, 2019.
Here is an architectural rendering of the roll-off building observatory in its “open” position:
There will be multiple educational displays around the exterior of the observatory. We want to use six descriptive plaques that will be approx. 16” x 16” that will provide the basic information for each of the telescopes and a typical view through 4 of them as two will be EAA scopes.
Here is a very quick mockup of what we are doing (please ignore the fact that the object viewed does not match the telescope described, but you get the idea):
We are soliciting sketches to be used on the four panels for the visual telescopes from Cloudy Nights members. We are hoping to have artists donate their images, but we can also discuss compensation if you do this work professionally. We are under a bit of a time crunch, so we’d like to have these in our hands within about a month. If you have something in the same object class as what we’ve requested below, we are open to substitutions of object, but not telescope size used for the observation.
This is what we are looking for:
• For the 32-inch f/3 StarStructure - Globular cluster (M13) at core resolving power from a 28-32” class telescope.
• For the 8-inch f/12 Moonraker - Jupiter and Galilean moons at 200-300x from an 8” class telescope using an eyepiece with an AFOV of 76-92°.
• For the 16-inch f/10 Meade ACF SCT - Ring nebula at 200-300x from a 15-18” telescope using an eyepiece with an AFOV of 76-92°.
• 5.5-inch f/7 TEC - Pleiades – We already have acquired the sketch for this one.
Please PM Jim Cole (CN tag: rockethead26) thru CN messaging if you have something that you think might fit our needs.
Thanks and the CN community has been a great help to me over the last couple of years in the selection of the telescopes, mounts and eyepieces being used. A special thanks to Mike at Astronomics and the CN admin team.
Jim
