Of course I didn't know this and thought the instrument was just wonderful. After all I had never seen a big refractor before and it rekindled my interest in observational astronomy. Up to this point I didn't have access to a telescope of any size and my experience with astronomy had been limited to binoculars and naked eye observations in a light-polluted urban environment.

The physics department was probably amused that I( was interested but I thought it was just wonderful. My friends Clay Johnson and John Locke got involved in the restoration and operation. We spend a lot of time cleaning the gears and experimenting with different filters and photographic techniques. By today's amateur standards it was really primitive. However, we would often have observing parties when students would wander in at night and we'd show off the telescope and whatever happened to "be up" at the moment. People knew the telescope was available when we rolled the roof off.

Here's what I found out about this telescope and its history. It is a 9.5" Warner and Swasey refractor which was built in 1887. As delivered it lacked a clock drive and one was added sometime around 1893. The focal length is 144" which makes if a f/15 instrument which is ideal for planetary observations. Many of the refractors of this period had this same approximate f ratio.

Here are some photos of the telescope's early days. The telescope was in a dome on the physics laboratory at 310-312 West Monument Street in Baltimore. Here is a view of the physics building and of the campus. The view of the campus is roughly pointed northeast and you can see the dome in the middle left. You can orient yourself with the Washington Monument in the upper right corner.

Here's what the telescope looked like in the dome:

Today the site of the old physics laboratory is a parking lot.

The view of the campus and the physics building came from a scan of pages of the book "Johns Hopkins Knowledge for the World" published in 2000. The photo of the telescope above is from the JHU Sheridan Libraries by way of Getty Images.

Sometime around 1915 the campus migrated to its current location on North Charles Street. As far as I can determine it was then that the telescope was relocated to a roll off roof observatory. Among our finds in this little observatory were a filar micrometer, a prism spectroscope, a sidereal clock (with a mercury compensated pendulum) and an adjustable observation chair. This chair made it (relatively) easy to get into position under the eyepiece.

Here are some views of the telescope in it's new location.

When talking about old refractors p eople always ask if the objective lens was made by Alvan Clark. He made some of the finest lenses for 19th century refractors including the 39" Yerkes Observator objective. However, we couldn't find out who actually made it. We did have the objective tested by Verne Muffoletto, a local optical expert, who said the lens "had a good figure and the glass quality of a fine milk bottle".

I left JHU in 1968 and haven't been back since. I did discover that the observatory is gone but the telescope has been preserved as something of a museum piece. The clock drive is gone and I suspect the objective has been removed for safe keeping. I have no idea what happened to the sidereal clock and the accessories. I picked up these two images from the Internet and my apologies to the photographer for not properly crediting them. If they're yours and you don't like them here I'll remove them. If you're okay with them being here I'll be glad to credit you.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand the telescope is preserved and is safe. On the other hand it wasn't designed to be a museum piece but rather as an optical tool to explore the stars and planets. It's too bad that it couldn't be retained in an operating environment so that the general public can experience what observation was like in the 19th century.