Description
Matted & ready to pop into a standard frame: This interesting 8 in. x 10 in. photo. This is a contemporary reprint made directly from a high resolution digital scan of the vintage photograph. The piece is crisply printed on matte finish photo paper & placed in a white acid-free matte, ready to be popped into a standard 11 in. x 14 in.; frame, which can be bought anywhere locally. From the web: Henry Tappan (first president of the University of Michigan) wanted the University to have an observatory. He solicited funds from some citizens of Detroit & subsequently built an observatory just outside the city limits of Ann Arbor (it is now inside the city limits & is part of the University's main campus). Because of the generosity of the Detroit donors, it became known as the Detroit Observatory (even though it is not located in Detroit). The Detroit Observatory was used to conduct a variety of research including the following: Locating new asteroids & determining the orbits of existing asteroids. The discovery of two comets & the determination of the orbits of several other comets. When the Great Comet of 1882 appeared, no one was quite sure if this was the same comet as a previously known comet or if it was a new undiscovered comet. The observatory was used to help answer that question. Determining the longitude of the telescope (while we take such things for granted now, accurate determination of longitude was a non-trivial task at the time). Construction of lunar tables. The search for Vulcan. in the 1800's certain irregularities in the orbit of Mercury could not be explained by Newton's Law of Gravitation. Some years earlier similar irregularities in the orbit of Uranus had been resolved by assuming an unseen body was responsible for perturbations. Therefore astronomers speculated that another new planet must exist that would explain the orbit of Mercury & this planet was given the name Vulcan. The search for Vulcan became an obsession of Watson, one of the directors of the observatory. However, the real solution to Mercury's orbit would wait until 1915: General Relativity correctly predicts the orbit of Mercury without resorting to unseen planets. At present there is no evidence for Vulcan & it probably does not exist. Determination of the aberration constant. Obtaining the spectrographs of stars (and other unspecified star observations). in addition to astronomical observations, weather observations were made at the observatory (for a while the observatory was a station of the U. S. Weather Service). No rights are granted or implied other than for personal collectible use. Makes a terrific gift for the observatory, telescope, astronomy, University of Michigan collector or other historic addition to your collection! pub places dir Matted Photograph | 8x10 - C.1905 Detroit Observatory, U. Of M., Ann Arbor, Michigan
