Tonight I headed (along with simonsatori and meme_me) over to a lecture at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy (CIA?) about binary star systems. We knew we were in the right place when we found a bunch of geeky types hanging around in the lobby outside the lecture theatre.
The lecture was quite nicely presented, but I’d have liked a bit more technical content….perhaps it was pitched about right for the whole audience though….interesting to see the laptop/project/radio-mic setup, lectures have moved on somewhat since my day.
After the talk they’d planned to take us to one of their telescopes to view some of the stellar systems they were talking about, but we got word at the end of the lecture that there was nothing to see but cloud. So they took us to see some of the equipment instead. What amazed me was the balance of the first scope we saw, it was around 165 years old and has been pretty much in regular use for most of that time, it was set up by the guy who originally commissioned it and hasn’t been adjusted since (you can tell that its not been touched for a considerable time because to the many layers of paint of the adjusting screws), mounted on a large gantry, but still easily movable with one hand.
Then they lead us across the darkened field (their lights shone down onto the path from about knee height) to another, more *scientific* building housing what they described as a camera, with a 36 inch mirror. But the place was remarkable more because of its smell – it smelled of progress, of experiments going wrong, of damp but lived-in buildings, of intelligence addicted to discovery of new useless things, of the kind of crazy mishmash of architecture and machinery I’d love to live in given the chance. Its the kind of place where you find a door labelled ‘caution hazardous chemicals’ open just a crack so you can see the cat-basket beyond.
Finally, they took us to their Mersenne-Schmidt Telescope[0], an interesting construction using a donut shaped mirror rather than a conventional disk and optically adjusting the image to recreate a conventional picture.
The lectures themselves are a regular series on wednesday nights, if anyone is interested in this sort of thing, you don’t seem to need to register or anything.
[0] I wonder if he was the same guy who did the primes?
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