It has a dual truss design, seven cooling fans and — wait for it — an azimuth dovetail balance system.
But there’s more. For an extra four and a half grand, the manufacturer will happily throw in an IRF90 Rotating Focuser.
Excited yet? OK. So perhaps such details will only set pulses racing for true astronomy nerds. For the rest of us, it’s enough to know that, after 32 years, Adler Planetarium’s observatory is getting a new state-of-the art telescope.
For now, the empty concrete observatory sitting at the eastern edge of the planetarium looks like an abandoned gun turret. The old telescope, hauled out of its home in late October, is in safe storage.
“We are hunting for a new owner for the telescope,” said Michelle Nichols, Adler’s director of public observing. “We have an organization that is considering our offer of a [free] telescope …. They are still thinking about it.”
In one sense, buying a new telescope is like buying a car.
“You find the size you want, and then you start figuring out who has got what features,” Nichols said.
In another sense, it’s not. There’s apparently no haggling on the price.
“We have set prices — and they are very reasonable prices,” said Richard Hedrick, president of PlaneWaves Instruments, the Michigan-based company building Alder’s new telescope.
The company builds 50 to 80 telescopes a year ranging in price from $10,000 to about $650,000. They’re built for museums, NASA, as well as the well-to-do.
“There is also the rich-guy market,” Hedrick said. “We have lots of customers who are building houses for observatories. We have someone who made a lot of money in the dot-com [industry] and he’s building a cabin in the mountains. He’s building a state-of-the-art observatory because he loves science.”
Adler, or rather a group of donors, is paying about $100,000 for the planetarium’s new telescope.
“The optics will be better,” Nichols said. “[Visitors] will see more details with something like Jupiter or Saturn or Mars.”
That’s mostly because the main mirror, which gathers and focuses the incoming light, is about 4 inches wider on the new telescope, Nichols said.
The scope is expected arrive in two crates in mid-December, Nichols said.
Are people as excited as they once were about peering at the night sky? After all, kids these days are more likely to ask for a cellphone or a laptop than a metal tube mounted on a rickety tripod.
“If we could open that observatory every night of the year, we would because we know that people would show up,” Nichols said.
“Seeing something with your own eye — there is nothing like it,” she added. “It is a visceral experience to be able to do that, and that’s the thing that gets people hooked on the subject.”
