My Whipple Museum Visit

Whilst having a day off in Cambridge I decided to visit the Whipple Museum. It took a few minutes to find the entrance behind a wooden door from the street and then up a flight of stairs, but it’s worth hunting the museum down, admission is free.

The Whipple Museum opens up Monday – Friday 12.30 – 4.30pm only, so don’t visit on a weekend or in the morning during the week!

The Whipple Museum’s collection includes scientific instruments, apparatus, models, pictures, prints, photographs, books and other material related to the history of science. Obviously the most interesting part for me was the collection of telescopes and astronomy related items.

The Whipple Museum was founded in 1944 when Robert Stewart Whipple (1871-1953) presented his collection of scientific instruments to the University of Cambridge.

The main telescope I wanted to see was the William Herschel Newtonian Telescope which is hard to miss in the main room.

The telescope takes its name from William Herschel (1738-1822), who achieved public acclaim and royal favour through his discovery of the planet Uranus. He originally called the planet the Georgium Sidus (Latin for ‘George’s Star’), to honour King George III in 1781.

A few years later George III requested that Herschel make a number of telescopes. The Whipple Museum’s example is one of five 10ft reflecting telescopes made in response to that request. Following Herschel’s standard design, the King’s cabinet maker constructed the mahogany stand and tube. Herschel made the optical parts himself.

There was also a telescope by James Short dated 1758. Short was known for his observations of comets, transits of Venus and the Northern lights.

Near the entrance of the museum is also a grand planetarium, aptly named the “Grand Orrery Planetarium” made by George Adams. 

An Orrery is a moving model of the motions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Orreries can be used to demonstrate phenomena such as day and night, the seasons, lunar phases, and eclipses.

The planetary model known as the ‘orrery’ takes its name from Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery. The London instrument maker John Rowley (circa 1668-1728) made the first orrery for Charles Boyle around 1713, but planetary models have existed since ancient times.

The grand orrery, displays the Sun in the centre, and the 6 planets known at the time with their satellites (four around Jupiter and five around Saturn). Saturn is the outermost planet, shown with its ring and the five satellites discovered by Christiaan Huygens and Giovanni Domenico Cassini between 1655 and 1684. The planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto had not yet been discovered when this orrery was made.

There was also a refracting telescope from the Dollond workshop built around 1800. This was used in St. John’s college observatory, until it was loaned to the Whipple museum in 1951.

The telescope has an altazimuth mounting and there was a mahogany case not on display contains additional eyepieces and filters to protect the eyes when viewing the sun.

There were many other astronomical items such as other electric planetariums, mirror cells, other brass telescopes.  The funniest thing though must have been the collection of old calculators in the second room, there are several drawers in this room, which you can open.  There were several drawers of calculators, many of which I remember, including a “Little Professor” calculator.

We stayed about an hour in the museum, unfortunately the upper room was closed on the day of our visit, so we only viewed two of the rooms.

If you want to know more about the museum the University has set up a really good web site, just search for the “Whipple Museum” in a search engine.

If you are in the Cambridge area though, drop in to the Whipple Museum, it’s definitely worth a visit.

Purchased a Meade DSI Pro II

I managed to sell my Meade DSI Pro I on eBay, I then purchased a Meade DSI Pro II from Telescope House over the final May Bank Holiday weekend when they gave me an extra 10% off the retail price.  Though I thought the price for the DSI Pro II was already a good price at £299, in fact the best I could find on the net.

I would have loved to have purchased a DSI Pro III, but there was no way I was going to spend £600 on a Deep Sky Imager, that’s the price of a new laptop, maybe in the future the price will come down and I may upgrade.

Anyway I have used the new Pro II version a couple of times and I can tell that it is slightly better than the first version, obviously there are more pixels that can be captured.

I was amazed to find out that there was no Autostar CD in the box, there was only an instructional DVD, which is the same as on the Meade website.  My first version did come with an Autostar CD, but maybe now they just expect you to download the latest version.

This is exactly what I did, as my original DSI came with something like Autostar v3, and I am now running something like v5. One of the main differences to the DSI software is that it now contained a field telling me the temperature of the CCD.

Now I think I have too much choice of what to use to image, do I use the DSI, Canon DSLR or Webcam? I am also thinking of purchasing a High Definition Camcorder to video our new child, but I’m sure I’ll want to somehow attach the camcorder to the telescope as well.

Sun Observer’s Guide Book Review

The Philip’s Sun Observer’s Guide is written by Pam Spence and is one of Philip’s pocket type astronomy books. This is the first solar book I have read, I am interested in solar observation as I it allows me to use my telescope in the day as well as just at night. 

The book first of all describes the structure of the sun including information on sunspots and solar winds.  There are then chapters on the types of instruments to use to observe the sun, including telescopes, pinhole cameras and filters.

How to observe the sun, walks you through how to safely view the sun with your telescope or binoculars by making homemade projections systems. 

A good section of the middle of the book is given over to telling you how to make observations and record the observations as well as how to analyse your findings.

As you would expect there is a chapter on solar eclipses and the book describes the theory behind the various types of solar eclipse.  There is also a small section on taking images of the sun, unfortunately it only talks about traditional SLR cameras, and not digital cameras, but it does provide some useful information on the types of shutter speed to use at various ISO levels and focal ratios dependent on the type of eclipse you are imaging.

The last section of the book tells you about the professional solar astronomy that is being conducted around the world. At the rear of the book is a useful list of past, present and future dates of eclipses and what you will see in differing parts of the world. 

Overall the Sun Observer’s Guide is a great little book, with some great images, and it provides the reader with a good all round knowledge of the sun and how to view it.  It would have been nice to see a bit more content on imaging the sun and various filters that could be used with a scope, but this book was never meant to go into that greater detail, but instead give the reader a good all round knowledge of the sun, which it does admirably.

Sun Observer’s Guide is available at Waterstones