The only outside station which the Observatory owned in 1921 was a post 8000 feet up in the Andes, at Arequipa, Peru. This one was abandoned because of long periods of cloudy weather. The Astronomy Department now operates from the central observatory on Summer House Hill on Concord Avenue. It also has a subsidiary station at Agassia (Dormerly Oak Ridge station) in Massachusetts two high altitude sites in Colorado, three stations in New Mexico, and at the Boyden station on Harvard Kopje on the high veldt of interior South Africa.

The most recent project of the Observatory in connection with international activities is the 61-inch telescope operated in Africa. Named the ADH and situated at Boyden station, it is an adventure in international co-operation in astronomy. It represents the best in combined planning of astronomers at three observatories: Armagh in North Ireland, Dunsink in Eire, and Harvard.

Fields Explored

There are two ways of working with telescopes, and two main areas of astronomical research. Many of the large observatories base their work on a few of the very large instruments, with numerous accessories. They place emphasis on getting the utmost out of their equipment.

The Observatory's work is chiefly of the second type, however, which is of equal importance and supplements the other work. The instrumental equipment used is of average or even small size, built to emphasize statistical surveys and long range cataloguing program. Although the Observatory has telescopes ranging over sixty inches, the most important work has been accomplished with telescope with lens apertures between eight and twenty-four inches.

The Harvard Observatory has dipped into many qualitative astronomical problems. It is known for research on solar phenomena, the galaxies and nebulae, the Milky Way, meteors and comets, stellar spectra, variable star astronomy, and globular clusters, and it specializen in astrophysics, the science that deals with the constitution of the stellar bodies.

Historical Data

The Harvard College observatory was opened in 1839 with the establishment of a few small instruments in the Data House in Quincy Square. William Cranch Bond, the first Astronomical Observer of the College struggled for a while with insufficient equipment.

While the work carried on at Dana House was confined to magnetic and meteorological observations, the work at the site of the present Cambridge Observatory was what set the Department on the road to its brilliant astronomical research.

Six acres of land on which it now rises remain of the original grounds. Before the coming of the Comet of 1843 the site, on Summer House Hill, just west of Radcliffe dorms, was purchased with the idea of erecting a better building when sufficient funds were available.

Public spirited Bostonians rescued the embryonic Observatory from obscurity, however. In March 1843, the appearance of a bright daylight comet aroused popular interest so that the present Observatory has often been spoken of as being "born of a comet." Funds were raised for a telescope that was to be second to none than operating.

Original Contributors

Contributors to the original telescope and its housing ranged from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to the Revere Copper Company. The lenses for the first telescope then called the Great Refractor, came from Munich in 1846 and 1847 and by June, 1847, the telescope was in use. A transit circle then came from London and the first $100,000 endowment--was received from the Phillips Fund shortly afterwards.

This Great Refractor with which Harvard began its astronomic history was then the equal of the world's largest telescope. It still stands on Observatory Hill with its fine lenses, but pictorially speaking its "mounting is outmoded, its drive antiquated and the dome squeaks with age when disturbed."

The first work that Director Bond undertook, which was continued by his son and successor, Professor George P. Bond was an extensive series of zone observations, elaborate drawings of the planet Saturn, and work on the comet of 1858, and on the nebula in Orion. He and his son also worked to determine terrestrial longitudes for the United States Coast Survey. Cambridge is still recognized as the "Birthplace of American Longitudes."