As a grad student, I had an opportunity to spend an evening using the 18" Clark at Amherst college to record a transit of Saturn's rings by a star. The setup was to use a video camera with a T to C adapter connected to a VHS recorder, and feed the WWV time signal into the audio input. That way, the light levels of the star could be precisely timed (at least to 1/30th second). I don't think the data ever got used, but it was cool to spend a long evening alone in the observatory, periodically moving the dome and the observing platform to track the scope and keep the cables from pulling the recorder off the desk, while also monitoring the image on a little B&W monitor.
At that time, I was approved to open and operate the observatory by myself. A bunch of us grad students had an astronomy club (some of them were actually in the astronomy department) and would use it on nights when it wasn't booked for a class. It's a headache to point, since you have to drag it around with one hand while running the controls to move the heavy copper dome and rail-riding platform - and it's got a lot of mass, so despite the good balance, there is significant inertia to overcome. There were also risks involved. One night, for example, we couldn't get the dome to close (the screws for the top and bottom of the slit would sometimes slip, causing the shutters to angle and bind). So we had to park the scope perpendicular to the slit, be sure that the garbage can lid was securely covering the objective, and call the tech, who came and fixed it the next day. If you weren't careful, you could also rip the 220V 3-phase power feeds out of their connections to the dome motors and power rails.
Given all that, and the narrow FOV, we mostly used it to look at things that were easy to find. Planets (although the adjacent pine forest, which had grown up since the observatory was built, blocked them unless they were high in the sky), M13, M57, M31. I remember M13 looking huge, even in a low power eyepiece. Only the central area of M31 fit in the view and was quite bright. We tried and tried to see the central star in M57, but I never managed it.
In the intervening years, they've completely changed the drives for the dome and platform (much safer, more reliable), so I'm no longer on the operator list. But the year before Covid, I took my class there for one of the open observing evenings. The long line to go up the stairs to the platform stopped moving for a while, and I realized the operator was struggling to get something into the view. So I cut the line and climbed up. The operator was about to give up, but he knew I had experience with the scope, and accepted my offer to try. It all came back quickly, and in about 20 seconds, I had the object centered.
The Clark had an interesting history, having been dismantled and sent at the behest of Percival Lowell, via steam ship, around the tip of South America, and carted in pieces by mule train into the Andes, where it was set up with the pier at a crazy angle, to observe a particularly close opposition of Mars. Then it was taken apart and shipped back to the college.
The thrill of using such a massive and historic instrument never goes away in my experience.
Chip W.
