Rutherford Observatory
Encyclopedia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
named after Lewis Morris Rutherfurd
Lewis Morris Rutherfurd
Lewis Morris Rutherfurd was an American lawyer and astronomer, and a pioneering astrophotographer.- Life and work :...
. Initially, Rutherfurd houses his telescopes and equipment in midtown Manhattan and later on the Stuyvesant Estate. When the Morningside campus was built, telescopes were kept in a "transit building" where the Interdisciplinary Science Building now stands. When Pupin Physics Laboratories were completed in 1927, the home of the observatory was moved to the top of the building. Below the Rutherford Observatory on the 14th floor was the site of Professor Wallace Eckert's Astronomical Laboratory, in which he constructed the first device to perform general scientific calculations automatically in 1933-34.
The observatory formerly included a twelve inch (30 cm.) refractor telescope
Telescope
A telescope is an instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation . The first known practical telescopes were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 1600s , using glass lenses...
built by the Alvan Clark
Alvan Clark
Alvan Clark , born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the descendant of a Cape Cod whaling family of English ancestry, was an American astronomer and telescope maker. He was a portrait painter and engraver , and at the age of 40 became involved in telescope making...
firm in 1916 for the Czarist government of Russia. It was to be installed at a site to observe an upcoming solar eclipse
Solar eclipse
As seen from the Earth, a solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, and the Moon fully or partially blocks the Sun as viewed from a location on Earth. This can happen only during a new moon, when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction as seen from Earth. At least...
in Russia. With unrestricted U-boat
U-boat
U-boat is the anglicized version of the German word U-Boot , itself an abbreviation of Unterseeboot , and refers to military submarines operated by Germany, particularly in World War I and World War II...
warfare during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
shipment was delayed until the war ended. The new Russian government headed by Lenin refused to pay for or accept the telescope, which sat in a crate in a warehouse until 1920, when Columbia bought it. The telescope was for many years been used almost entirely for student education. The telescope was sold in 1997 to South Carolina State Museum
South Carolina State Museum
The South Carolina State Museum, located in Columbia, South Carolina, is the largest museum in the Southeastern United States. Positioned on an old shipping canal on the Congaree River that dates back to pre-Civil War times, the museum is widely recognized as a resource for South Carolina history...
that specializes in the upkeep of the old Alvan Clark refractors. They plan to use it for actual observing again very soon.
In the 1970s, the "Columbia CO Survey" built a 1.2 meter radio telescope that operated out of the Little Dome and was the first to map the sky in this important radio band.
Rutherfurd observatory has been in continuous operation since Pupin was constructed, but in 2009 a new "Northwest Corner Building" was erected next to it, six floors higher than the roof of Pupin and blocking a significant portion of its field of view, and putting out a considerable amount of light, interfering with observations in the remaining sky.