Perched at the top of College Park, Shattuck Observatory has been looking out over campus and up into the cosmos since 1853.
Open the dome of the observatory and the metal doors sing an impressive protest. Sunlight slips through the cracks and catches the chipped paint on the walls and on the 1871 Clark refracting telescope, which still rises through the full height of the room. After 173 years, Shattuck is showing its age.
“I never know now if I’ll be able to close the dome when I open Shattuck,” says Marie Calapa, instructional lab manager for the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
That’s about to change. Astronomer Doug Arion ’79, who found inspiration at Shattuck as a student, is funding a complete refurbishment of the telescope and dome. The telescope will be lifted out and taken to Massachusetts, where restoration experts at Boston Science LLC will rebuild it over the next year and a half. While it’s away, Dartmouth’s Facilities Operations and Management team will strip the dome room and rebuild it to modern standards, with HVAC, new floors, and better waterproofing.
Few people on campus are happier about it than Calapa. Part of her job is managing Shattuck for college and community observing, and she’s now a major coordinator on the renovation.
When she arrived four years ago, she could see Dartmouth was close to losing a living piece of its history. She worked with groups across campus to get the dome rotating again and the rust under control. Even so, she now relies on the sheds that house the newer telescopes with digital controls.
Calapa worked at two historic observatories before Dartmouth, and she’s felt the difference on days when the antique instruments come out for the public.
“They don’t build observatories like this anymore,” Calapa says. “Shattuck and the Clark telescope are exactly what you think of when you imagine astronomy. And that does something to people when they experience astronomy this way. It’s visceral.”
From Garden Shed to Observatory
Shattuck was Dartmouth’s first major investment in scientific research. It exists largely because of one persistent physics professor.
Up through the mid 1800s, higher education in America was heavily focused on theology and lectures. Physics, then called ‘natural philosophy’, was only taught to the extent that it demonstrated the glory of God. Research wasn’t considered part of the job.
The 9.4-inch refracting telescope by Alvan Clark & Sons, with Clark’s multi-prism spectroscope attached at the eyepiece (lower left). (Rauner Library Photographic Files, 1885)
Across the Antebellum North, though, interest in science was growing fast, especially in astronomy. Dartmouth’s administration resisted. Nathan Lord, president from 1828 to 1863, announced in his inaugural address that he planned to turn his back on the “crowds of innovation in education” that were “changing so rapidly the civilization of our fathers.”
Raised as a carpenter’s son, Ira Young fought to get into Dartmouth and eventually to teach physics there. He was scrappy, energetic, and unconventional. Young was one of the first to move his teaching away from lectures and toward doing research with his students.
He was also the College’s liaison to his family’s carpentry business, which built several campus buildings, including Dartmouth Hall and Reed Hall. In all of his designs, Young made sure to set aside space for future scientific equipment. It’s unclear whether he asked for permission or forgiveness. Either way, the Board of Trustees was charmed, and it’s hard to find any record of them denying one of his many requests.
In 1846, Young lobbied for the College’s first telescope and even convinced Congress to waive the import tax. When his garden shed couldn’t hold all the eager new stargazers, he persuaded the wealthy George C. Shattuck to finance a proper observatory, then persuaded the College to approve it. His brother, Amma, designed and built it in 1853.
Students, faculty, staff, and the public used the observatory immediately and constantly. Dartmouth soon started advertising it to prospective students, and other science professors followed Young’s lead and asked for research equipment of their own.
Students at the Eyepiece
Ira’s son, Charles Young, grew up in Shattuck and went on to make discoveries foundational to the field of solar physics. He succeeded his father as professor and made a habit of working with outside colleagues and government groups. He was the first at Dartmouth to publish in the world’s leading scientific journals, which put the College at the front of international research. Like his father, Charles was beloved by students for his endless enthusiasm and his drive to share it.
In 1871, Charles replaced his father’s telescope with the one still in Shattuck today. It was built by Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridge, Mass., whose lenses are still considered among the finest ever produced.
“The survival of a functioning instrument of this pedigree is exceptionally rare,” says Alan Sliski, the lead restoration expert on the project.
Ira, Charles, and their students worked side by side, and that collaboration was an educational innovation in its own right. Together they had to invent ways to catalog and analyze huge amounts of new data. By the end of the 1800s, observatories around the world were working with big data long before anyone had the computing power to make full use of it.
Some students practically moved in. Shattuck has been a weather station since the beginning, and in the 1880s, students lived there rent-free in exchange for maintaining the instruments and taking daily weather measurements.
Frank Sanborn ’87 and Charles Chase ’85 in their Shattuck Observatory lodgings in 1884 (Rauner Library Photographic Files)
For decades, students, staff, faculty, and neighbors gathered there on clear nights. Richard Poor, an early observatory director, was famous for serving hot coffee and oyster stew.
That community engagement never went away. When Shattuck was under threat of demolition in 2017, more than 2,000 people across the Upper Valley and around the world signed a petition to stop the new construction.
Back to Life
Arion is one of the students who turned what he found at Shattuck into his life’s work. He’s professor emeritus of physics and astronomy and entrepreneurial studies at Carthage College, and a founder and executive director of Mountains of Stars, which promotes “environmental awareness from a cosmic perspective.”
“I’ve thought that having an astronomical bent makes people more aware of the unique environment we have here on Earth, and will better protect it,” Arion says.
For him, the restoration is also personal.
“Shattuck was very important to me as an undergrad. I have some amazing friends because of that—and we’re still close friends all these decades later. Back then, the chance to use a good telescope whenever we wanted was pretty amazing,” Arion says. “It’s incredibly sad for a historic telescope to fall into the disrepair that has happened to Shattuck, and this is a chance to bring it back to life. I’ve wanted to do something that would have a lasting impact and connect people to the greater universe.”
Doug Arion ’79 (left) with Mark Tomalonis ’79 at Kitt Peak National Observatory; both have fond memories of looking at the stars from Shattuck Observatory.
At Boston Science, the restorers will take the telescope apart and polish, sandblast, and strip every component, down to the screws, to its original state before putting it back together.
“When the telescope comes back in a year or two, we will throw a big welcome back party,” Calapa says.
She already gets requests from across Dartmouth to book Shattuck for events. Once it’s restored, she hopes to host art shows, alumni gatherings, observing nights, and dance expos. She also plans to turn the room beneath the telescope into a museum of Charles Young’s instruments.
“Dartmouth has such a unique and beautiful gift of this historic place and a student body that wants to engage with subjects outside themselves,” she says.
Most of all, people want to see Shattuck do what it was built to do.
“There is no better way to honor Shattuck’s history and celebrate the academic ethos it sparked than to restore it as a working observatory,” says Miles Blencowe, the Eleanor and A. Kelvin Smith Distinguished Professor in Physics.
Whatever its next chapter looks like, Shattuck will be back, pulling visitors close together so they can look far beyond themselves.
The date of the telescope’s removal will be posted in Vox Daily, and restoration updates will be shared on YouTube. Sanborn Brown and Leonard Rieser’s Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth and Richard Kremer’s A Brief History of Shattuck informed this story. Copies of both are available in the physics and astronomy office in Wilder 105.