20th September 2010
Twelve of us got to see this observatory which is on a good site next to the playing fields in Marlborough College (a private school).
The main instrument is a 10” f15 (or thereabouts) refractor, made by Thomas Cooke of York and at the time (1860) it was the 4th largest refractor in the UK.
I won’t bore you but here are a few interesting snippets:
It was built for a Mr Barclay who turns out to be the great grandfather of the first cousin of Charles Barclay who is the astronomy teacher at the college now. Charles did not know of the family connection until he began researching. The original Mr (Joseph) Barclay was also a friend of William Herschel.
The telescope was donated to the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford in 1885 and when that closed it was moved to Marlborough and named after Sir Basil Blackett, who taught there. It was opened in 1935.
When Charles Barclay was appointed in 1997 he set about restoring the observatory and that was completed in 2009. He discovered the dome was a dazzlingly bright copper under the old paint but the council told him to paint it over (hazard to aircraft!?).
There is also a 6” Newtonian (1930s) and a 4” Cooke refractor of 1880, as well as other smaller instruments. A 5” solar (Daystar, H alpha) filter was commissioned for the 10”and that took five years to be done.
Thanks to Charles’ enthusiasm he stayed to let us have a look through the 10” and had good views of Jupiter and Uranus together in the same field of view. Conditions worsened soon after dark and some of us glimpsed Neptune before we were clouded out.
My parting comment is that the children at Marlborough are lucky to have such an enthusiastic schoolmaster, no wonder he has at least 70 students this year. Charles has even got around the problem of the observatory not being open to the public by setting up a “Friends of Marlborough Observers” group and providing open evenings for them. 120 families subscribe at the moment.
And if you want to get youngsters interested in astronomy, do it when they are young. Get them interested before they hit their teens!
Photos
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Comments to Webmaster@abingdonastro.org.uk | Last revision: October 2010 |