The UCNC excursion today was to the Nice Observatory, barely a 20 minute coach ride up a nearby hill. Well over 30 minutes into the journey, around scary hairpin bends, near Monaco, the driver finally admitted he had gone the wrong way. Turning the coach on a road I swear was narrower than the coach was long had several of us recalling the ending of The Italian Job. More swooping around hairpins, and we finally arrived at the observatory, over an hour late, and slightly nauseous.
The observatory itself was great. We saw three historical telescopes, one of which was the largest privately-funded telescope in the world in its day.
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| Too large to photograph the whole refractor; inside a lovely wooden dome |
Next we went to see the Coudé (French for elbow). This was a new design, using mirrors to allow the eyepiece to stay in a fixed position: no leaping up and down giant staircases to view and adjust the scope. Ironically, the development of mirrors good enough for this purpose meant that refractors were replaced by much more compact reflectors, so very few of this design were ever built.
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The Coudé, but where's the dome?
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| The "dome", a moveable shed on rails |
Next, on to the final telescope, in an amazing building. Designed (somewhat literally) as a "temple to science", it has a large, recently regilded, sculpture over the entrance.
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| A 100 ton dome on a solid foundation, with a dramatic entrance. |
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| A closer look |
Inside, another large refracting telescope too long to fit in one photograph.
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| The finder scopes are themselves quite large. |
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| The other end. |
The 100 ton dome was designed by Eiffel. A dome has to rotate. 100 tons has to rotate. Eiffel designed a combination of rails and hydraulic support. Today, it's just rails.
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| Documentation |
There was an exhibition of instruments in the large dome. Because we were so late, there was no time to see it. Grumble.
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