Changes between Version 17 and Version 18 of Outreach/HandyFacts

Timestamp:

04/25/12 12:19:02 (14 years ago)

Author:

jps@…

Comment:

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Outreach/HandyFacts

@@ -11 +11 @@
  * A twelve inch (30 cm.) refractor telescope built by the Alvan Clark firm in 1916 for the Czarist government of Russia was to be installed in Crimea to observe an upcoming solar eclipse and verify Einstein's theory of relativity. With unrestricted U-boat warfare during World War I shipment was delayed until the war ended. The new Russian government headed by Lenin refused to pay for or accept the telescope, which sat in a crate in a warehouse until 1920, when Columbia bought it. Upon the completion of Pupin Hall, it was located to the big dome which was built especially to house that telescope. The telescope was sold in 1997 to South Carolina State Museum that specializes in the upkeep of the old Alvan Clark refractors. They plan to use it for actual observing again very soon: http://www.museum.state.sc.us/plan_visit/observatory.aspx
  * In the 1970s, the "Columbia CO Survey" built a 1.2 meter radio telescope that operated out of the Little Dome and was the first to map the sky in this important radio band. See a picture of this at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/mmw/mini_NY_210.jpg
- * Rutherfurd observatory has been in continuous operation since Pupin was constructed, but in 2009 a new "Northwest Corner Building" was erected next to it, six floors higher than the roof of Pupin and blocking a significant portion of its field of view, and putting out a considerable amount of light, interfering with observations in the remaining sky.
- * Below the Rutherford Observatory on the 14th floor was the site of Professer Wallace Eckert's Astronomical Laboratory, in which he constructed the first device to perform general scientific calculations automatically in 1933-34. 
+ * Rutherfurd Observatory has been in continuous operation since Pupin was constructed, but in 2009 a new "Northwest Corner Building" was erected next to it, six floors higher than the roof of Pupin and blocking a significant portion of its field of view, and putting out a considerable amount of light, interfering with observations in the remaining sky.
+ * Below the Rutherfurd Observatory on the 14th floor was the site of Professer Wallace Eckert's Astronomical Laboratory, in which he constructed the first device to perform general scientific calculations automatically in 1933-34. 
  * Pupin Hall is also where Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and other physicists began work on developing a self-sustaining neutron chain reaction in 1939, in the basement. When Fermi's work moved to the University of Chicago after Pearl Harbor so it would be safer from attack from the sea, it was called the Manhattan Project because of where it had begun, and it kept its name when it moved later to Los Alamos, New Mexico.  Here is an article from the NYT describing the Manhattan roots of the Manhattan project: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html?pagewanted=1.