Ysabette and I were discussing everyday superpowers, AKA extreme cleverness, and I mentioned the Boxing Glove Telescope, then set about trying to find a photo.

And lo....



Perhaps slightly oversaturated? Taken in 2004 with a Canon Digital Rebel (350D), 6 megapixel camera.

Anyway, this is the Pluto Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. This is a plate telescope, not an optical telescope. The tube beneath the large diameter cylinder is a guiding telescope to ensure the telescope is pointing in the right direction, then you load a glass plate coated in a dried liquid emulsion in the plate holder of the upper cylinder. Open the dome, pop the cover off the telescope (if there was one, I don't remember, start the clock drive, remove the slide on the plate holder, and you're off to the races.

I'm going to be posting more photos of Lowell Observatory later, I thought I'd lost them: turned out I was looking in the wrong year! The important part is the boxing glove - when the telescope was at a high angle, astronomers were constantly bashing their head on that long rod, so someone grabbed a boxing glove and taped it to the arm.

Problem solved.

When I said 'clock drive' three paragraphs ago, I meant clock drive. It looks a lot like a cuckoo or grandfather/mother clock with a weight suspended from a chain. You would wind it up, flip a switch, and it would move the telescope along its right ascension/declination track, keeping it pointing at the same patch of sky for the duration of the plate exposure. When the time was up, or presumably just before, the astronomer would come back to the dome, put the dark slide back in to the plate holder, and replace that particular glass plate with another. When the evening's exposures were done, they'd go into a dark room and spend some time developing the plates, then spend MANY hours staring into a blink comparator, seeing if they could discover something.

I'll have pix of that later!

I just wanted to show the boxing glove.

Actually, there was one other clever thing that I wanted to show off: a 2004 pic of my wife pouring liquid nitrogen into a fruit juice bottle with the bottom cut off to refill an instrument. And yes, she has accidentally splashed the nitrogen and gotten it in her mouth. NOT recommended.



Think of using a magnifying glass to focus our sun on a piece of paper. Paper bursts into flame. Now use a 3.5 meter mirror to focus a sun on to a chip or detector. It has to be cooled. That requires either liquid nitrogen (LN) or an electronic cryogenic cooling system. That's what she's doing here. The LN systems generally have about a 14 hour hold time, so they can be refilled at the beginning and end of shift and they're OK, during the winter the day staff will fill them before they leave. The cryogenic systems are a brand name called Cryotigers and run through the instrument umbilical cords down to the dome's intermediate levels as they generate too much heat to keep them on the telescope level.