As home to Harvard University’s Oak Ridge Observatory for more than seven decades, the town of Harvard once enjoyed a unique connection with its night sky. The facility, operated jointly with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was home to the largest telescope east of Texas, the 61-inch-wide Wyeth telescope, an instrument used by astronomers, including Harvard’s own David Latham, to detect the first potential planet beyond our solar system. The late Mac McCrosky of Old Littleton Road was for years its director, where he and his colleagues named and cataloged scores of asteroids and comets, while others conducted long-term studies of star velocities and other celestial phenomena. Students in Harvard’s Astronomy 101 class, “Astrophysics Laboratory,” drove out from Cambridge to conduct their experiments.
The facility was closed in 2005. Its quaint brick buildings, built during the 1930s, remain scattered across the observatory’s small campus. Now off-limits to the public, the grounds were once a hive of activity after sunset, with students and researchers arriving to use the instruments, sometimes catching up on sleep in the observatory’s guesthouse. Periodically, the staff would open the grounds to local residents, a popular event that brought crowds to Pinnacle Road for a tour of the station’s several optical telescopes, a look at Mars on a close approach to Earth, or a peek at the colored lines traced by monitors displaying signals from the facility’s radio telescope in a Planetary Society-funded search for extraterrestrial life.
At the time of its closing, managers at the Center for Astrophysics said that light pollution was not a factor in its decision. But Harvard is no longer a place with pitch-black skies. Step onto a field on a moonless night and the horizon glows faintly with light from the Shirley prison, or the town of Ayer and other nearby urban centers, or our own school buildings. And yet, on cloudless nights, you’ll be amazed by how much can be seen, from faraway galaxies, stars, and planets to our neighbor, the moon.
This week the Press renews our town’s romance with the night sky by introducing a new column, “Sky Walker,” written by amateur Harvard stargazer Marc Vilain. Check it out and then make some time to look skyward. Let us know what you think about the column and the topics you’d like to see covered in the weeks ahead. And may the force be with you.
