If an "OR" is an Observing Report, than I'll call this a "Museum Report"...
I'm in Bath, England at the moment, having spent the last week and half in England and Scotland with my father,
tracing the footsteps of pioneering geologists. We've been to the places where the science was, for most intents and purposes, invented. A rocky outcrop on the Scottish coast called Siccar Point was the best - it is where the realization was first made that the earth must be unimaginably old.
We found that the city of Bath was a convenient place to pass through, and what did we find here but the William Herschel museum! It's in an old Georgian house, where Herschel lived when he was the music director for the city.
It's a small museum, but it was really neat. It showed what a house of the period looked like, and it had a number of Herschel objects. There was a detailed replica of one of his telescopes, and it had an interesting feature related to the focuser: The eyepiece and secondary were both mounted to a dovetail slide, which slide back and forth on a rack and pinion. (A little bit like a filter slide on a big dob.) So, when you focused, you didn't slide the eyepiece in and out, you slid the whole deal up and down the length of the tube. Very clever. I would imagine that it also helped accomodate the change in focal length that occurred when you had to repolish the speculum mirror.
Speaking of speculum mirrors, they had Herschel's old workshop, where he cast and ground his speculum mirrors. The flagstone floor was cracked from an incident in which molten metal leaked suddenly from the furnace, pouring onto the stone floor and shattering it. Herschel and his assistant dived out the doors.
Immediately adjacent to the workshop was the garden where Uranus was discovered. How wonderful to stand in the very spot! It was much like visiting the outcrops where the early geologists made their discoveries. Not only that, but Herschel discovered infrared radiation here, too. Amazing.
If there's one thing that impressed me about both the early geologists and Herschel, it was how good they were with what they had. The outcrops we visited were certainly good, and as 21st century geologists we could easily see the important features. But to think that these guys had seen and understood so much back in the 1700s and 1800s was amazing. The same was true with Herschel's instruments. We were impressed with how precisely and beautifully things were made, but the equipment just didn't have many modern advantages. Very simple mountings, for example.
And most of all, EYEPIECES. Holy mackerel, you should see these things. Nicely made brass barrels and lenses, but TINY! As far from Naglers as you can possibly imagine. Take the dinkiest .965" eyepiece you ever saw on a junk Tasco, and that's like a Terminagler compared to what Herschel worked with. My admiration for him and Caroline went up considerably.
Hope that all is well in the Bay Area. I'll be back in a few days, I'll probably be observing at MB on Wed and then every night through the weekend. It will be good to see the gang!
Clear Skies,
Marek