The Great Equatorial Telescope for Melbourne 1868 Birdwood Avenue steerable
Shipped out from its makers in Ireland in 1869, the Great Melbourne Telescope was pieced together in a custom-designed building at the Melbourne Observatory on Birdwood Avenue. For four decades it remained the world's biggest fully steerable telescope, able to map the southern skies in greater detail thanks to its advanced equatorial mount, which could swing to cover all points of the sky. "This was a highly significant telescope," said Richard Gillespie, head of history and technology at Museum Victoria. "Before that, all they could do was raise a telescope pretty much in an up- and-down, north-south orientation." A masterpiece of Victorian engineering, the telescope has a curved mirror metres across and an long tube. It remained at the Melbourne Observatory, just outside the Botanic Gardens, until the 1940s, when it was sold for less than $1000 - little more than scrap value. And despite its historical significance, the telescope was dismantled and its parts scattered nationally. This week the parts will reunite. On Wednesday, much like when it arrived from Ireland last century, parts of the Great Melbourne Telescope will be packed up in Canberra for return to its original observatory site. The project, a three-way collaboration between Museum Victoria, the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Astronomical Society of Victoria, has recovered about 90 per cent of the telescope. Most of it, including the tube, primary mirrors, eye pieces and other original mechanisms were retrieved from storage at Museum Victoria, while the rest, including the ground-breaking mount, polar axis and mirror support system, will return from Canberra's observatory at Mount Stromlo. This time however, putting together the telescope and mount will pose a greater challenge. "It's like a giant Meccano set and the thing is that we don't have any engineering or construction plans for it," Astronomical Society of Victoria vice-president Jim Pollock said.
Size: 3363px × 5025px
Photo credit: © 19th era / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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