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I was delighted to see the photograph of the 36-inch refractor telescope at Lick Observatory in The New York Times articles in the Travel section (“Gazing into the past and future,” Star-Advertiser, Nov. 26).
I did part of my Ph.D. thesis work with that telescope in the mid-1960s at the University of California at Berkeley. (I have been on the University of Hawaii astronomy faculty since 1967.) The observer had to move that huge telescope by hand to go to the next star. And the whole floor was an elevator, so you could get your eye to the eyepiece no matter where the telescope was pointed in the sky. It was a huge dome and had a huge floor of beautiful hardwood.
King Kalakaua visited Lick Observatory in 1881, via stagecoach, before this telescope was built. There was a 12-inch refractor that he looked through then.
Ann M. Boesgaard
Waialae Iki
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