| The M.C. Mackett & Co. Telescope |
This instrument is a nice example of
what is becoming more and more less
common to see. That is a classic
refracting telescope in use today.
Many schools, planetariums and small
observatories are removing these
instruments in favor of replacing them
with Schmidt Cassegrains and other
reflecting telescopes.
Large refracting telescopes such as
this instrument were state of the art
one hundred years ago or so.
Today most have disappeared or have
removed from use and not refurbished
to be placed in storage.
It is refreshing to see that some classic
telescopes are still leading productive
lives.
The story begins one fall day when we received an e-mail about a refractor needing some drive repairs in the Woodland Hills High
School. Jayson Kowinsky Physics Instructor reported problems with the RA drive and asked for assistance in resolving the problem.
First I was amazed that such an instrument of 9 inches in aperture existed in the any of the Western Pennsylvania School Districts!
Being curious;I decided to make the 45 minute drive and take a look at the telescope. The High school is located in Churchill
Borough close to Monroeville, PA just NE of Pittsburgh. Approaching the High School along Greensburg Pike Rd, the dome of the
facility is quite obvious. I parked the car and proceeded to the school's office.
Once past security; it is a short walk to our first destination and we stop in the middle of a busy hall. The door to the observatory is
located in this major hallway between classes. It does not standout any more than any other entrance door and can easily be
mistaken for a closet or janitors room. However, once the door is unlocked & opened it is a simple climb up a spiral staircase to the
great telescope.
The instrument is very impressive, situated within a fully domed addition that resides on a rooftop. Overall the telescope is in very
good condition. The long focus tube assembly must be at least an F15 if not longer, which nearly hits the wall in some spots of the
building.
The telescope in one way is everything you can want in a large refracting
telescope. It certainly is a lot of fun climbing ladders to look at Celestial
objects. The equatorial mount moves freely and with precision.
To handle a telescope this long requires some timing work - first removing
the "shower cap" that protects the main objective lens, then carefully
"throwing" that end of the tube up in the air. You now must dash to the
opposite end of the tube before it swings down towards the ground and
crashes into the pier or something. It is a simple procedure; but requires
proper timing to do it right. Jayson Kowinski removes "shower cap" from main lens
With the dome open I could read a manufactures name on the tail stock of the telescope. The firm of C. E. Mackette
& Co Manufacturers & Opticians, of Brighton, England. This certainly did not sound familuar to me. The lens was examined by
myself and was fairly clean from our angle of view. However a good cleaning of the outer element with Colledion USP or other
appropriate concentrate would certainly be helpful.
Upon examination of the mount I could see that while to tube assembly appeared to be original for the most part; except for paint;
the equatorial mounting was made by the famous Cave Optical Co., of Long Beach California !
Two AC synchronous motors controlled the RA drive both were 115 Volt 60 cycles and 4 watts running at one rpm.
One motor ran the actual clock drive while the other was used for slow motor control. Both motors were made by the Bristol Motor of
Old Slaybrook Conn. Bristol has been super ceded by Cramer Co.
New motors have been located at www.surplushed.com and
also Herbach & Rademan in Moorestown, NJ. 1-800-848-8001.
They are also the same as used by the Cave optical Co.
The slow motion control box was another weak link in the
telescopes guiding system.
The entire control box is in need of replacing old brittle wires
and the transformer. An upgrade to a modern control box is
highly recommended at this time.
Now, that I felt comfortable with identifying the problem and work
needed to correct the telescopes guiding system; I became more and more perplexed with C. E. Macket & Co and
how in the world did this telescope having been made in England ever find its way to America.
I contacted the Antique Telescope Society by placing a post on the Oldscope yahoo website concerning the instrument with a link to
plenty of pictures but received no response. Finally an attempt was made by placing the images and some general information on
the Amateur Astronomer Association of Pittsburgh's List server.
Dave Smith posted the request and we received an e-mail fro a former Woodland Hills High School student - John Hartman. Mr.
Hartman explained he attended the High School in 1963 when it first opened, but was unaware of the telescope.
He also suggested we contact Lee Schaefer the High School's former Physics teacher. Here is an account of what Mr. Schaefer had
to say:
" The best source of information about the scope would be Churchill's
first astronomy instructor - Bob Mousseau.
He approached the course from the mathamaical/physics point of view.
One of his tests was to give students an object and they had to use the
tables, calculate the sidereal time and point the telescope with the
dome closed. He would then open the dome and grade them on how many
degrees off they were.
My recollections in no particular order:
The scope was purchased through the NSF program and I believe it came from the private observatory of an English baron who
went bankrupt and sold it. The school only had to pay $50 for a change order for the
architect to add the doom to the roof. The problem is that since it was added as an afterthought, the doom sits on
the roof with no supporting structure underneath. Consequently, if you take a photographic time exposure, you can see the
vibration of a truck going down Greensburg Pike or someone slamming a door in the building.
The mount would get out of alignment and before any serious
photography, we had to align it on the pole star. One night as I was doing this,a meteor past through the filed of view. I bet I'm one
of the few people to have ever seen one with a scope that big!
The scope was too long and I this was corrected by cutting about a foot off the end before I arrived.
The cut off piece was in the physics stockroom for years.
As one of the physics instructors (the other was Bob Mc Afoos) I became the resident scope technician.
I spent hours working on the scope, dome and doors and they never paid me a cent - but it was a lot of fun. I believe I replaced
those motors many years ago. They are standard low RPM 60 HZ synchronous motors and
should not be hard to find or replace. The critical one is that sky tracker but the advance motor can be any
speed.
Jayson marks the position of the worm gear to check for movement against the drive housing.
One of our the first projects was to remove the stair railing and
install the trap door since the railing blocked the prime viewing area for the moon and planets.
I'm not sure about the sharpness of the lens but the flair levels were fairly low. There are some bubbles in the optical glass! We
started fooling with it, the image seemed rather poor and I discovered that
water and dirt had gotten between the two elements of the objective lens. After a careful cleaning, it looked
much better. One year the guidance department put a special ed girl in my physics class. She could not do the physics but was
great in home etcso I gave her the assignment of making a waterproof cover for the scope.
We bought an "astro camera" that projected the image onto a 3"X4" film
holder and was great for taking pictures of the moon but not much else.
It's main problem was focus since the back of the camera which had a
ground glass screen almost touched the
wall. The other problem was that the best night for astro-photography
in the 'Burg is when the temperature is below zero! It was handy
having the darkroom adjacent to the observatory.
Later, I bought an adapter for the AV Department's Nikon F camera and
that worked much better. The field of view was about 1/4 of the moon.
One night I happened to notice that Jupiter was low on the horizon and
the sky was clear so I fired up the scope and got a great image of the moons. When I showed a print to Mr.
Mousseau, he wanted me to try the next night to show his students how much the moons moved. By some stroke of luck we had
nine straight nights of clear sky in Pittsburgh. I made up sets of the images and the students used these to calculate the orbital
periods to with in a few percent of the accepted values.
Unfortunately, this scope is only good for the moon and planets. Other objects are viewable but very faint. We always thought that
it would have been better for instructional use to have constructed a "viewing deck" and bought several Queststar scopes.
To show of the scope for parent's nigh open house, I made an adapter to attach one of our 2/3" Sony vidicon cameras to the scope
and had a TV set in the hall. The camera would show about 1/3 of the moon and made a
spectacular picture.
I also made a wide field scope using the
18" F4 lens from an opaque projector and
a 4"X5" film holder on the back. This contraption
could piggy back on the main scope which became
the viewfinder.
Another adapter that I constructed was an adapter
to mount a photo multiplier tube that I scrounged
from Westinghouse Research. The tricky part was
building a 1000V power supply. It had a jacket to
cool it with dry ice. It could measure the luminosity
of stars reliably down to about seventh magnitude.
Penn Hills put in a planetarium in their high school
about the same time. Mr. Mousseau and the PH
instructor wanted to cooperate & have the students
from both schools use our scope on clear nights
and go over to PH on cloudy nights. Unfortunately,
the PH school board would not allow the to do that!
They sad the PH students could go to CAHS but
because the PH tax payers had paid for their
planetarium, no one else was allowed to use it!
After the PH instructor left, they could never find
another teach who could run the system so they
removed it and converted the area into a TV studio
If you need some help fixing the place up, let me
know. I still know most of the spots that need
some oil!" - Lee Schaefer
School. Jayson Kowinsky Physics Instructor reported problems with the RA drive and asked for assistance in resolving the problem.
First I was amazed that such an instrument of 9 inches in aperture existed in the any of the Western Pennsylvania School Districts!
Being curious;I decided to make the 45 minute drive and take a look at the telescope. The High school is located in Churchill
Borough close to Monroeville, PA just NE of Pittsburgh. Approaching the High School along Greensburg Pike Rd, the dome of the
facility is quite obvious. I parked the car and proceeded to the school's office.
Once past security; it is a short walk to our first destination and we stop in the middle of a busy hall. The door to the observatory is
located in this major hallway between classes. It does not standout any more than any other entrance door and can easily be
mistaken for a closet or janitors room. However, once the door is unlocked & opened it is a simple climb up a spiral staircase to the
great telescope.
The instrument is very impressive, situated within a fully domed addition that resides on a rooftop. Overall the telescope is in very
good condition. The long focus tube assembly must be at least an F15 if not longer, which nearly hits the wall in some spots of the
building.
The telescope in one way is everything you can want in a large refracting
telescope. It certainly is a lot of fun climbing ladders to look at Celestial
objects. The equatorial mount moves freely and with precision.
To handle a telescope this long requires some timing work - first removing
the "shower cap" that protects the main objective lens, then carefully
"throwing" that end of the tube up in the air. You now must dash to the
opposite end of the tube before it swings down towards the ground and
crashes into the pier or something. It is a simple procedure; but requires
proper timing to do it right. Jayson Kowinski removes "shower cap" from main lens
With the dome open I could read a manufactures name on the tail stock of the telescope. The firm of C. E. Mackette
& Co Manufacturers & Opticians, of Brighton, England. This certainly did not sound familuar to me. The lens was examined by
myself and was fairly clean from our angle of view. However a good cleaning of the outer element with Colledion USP or other
appropriate concentrate would certainly be helpful.
Upon examination of the mount I could see that while to tube assembly appeared to be original for the most part; except for paint;
the equatorial mounting was made by the famous Cave Optical Co., of Long Beach California !
Two AC synchronous motors controlled the RA drive both were 115 Volt 60 cycles and 4 watts running at one rpm.
One motor ran the actual clock drive while the other was used for slow motor control. Both motors were made by the Bristol Motor of
Old Slaybrook Conn. Bristol has been super ceded by Cramer Co.
New motors have been located at www.surplushed.com and
also Herbach & Rademan in Moorestown, NJ. 1-800-848-8001.
They are also the same as used by the Cave optical Co.
The slow motion control box was another weak link in the
telescopes guiding system.
The entire control box is in need of replacing old brittle wires
and the transformer. An upgrade to a modern control box is
highly recommended at this time.
Now, that I felt comfortable with identifying the problem and work
needed to correct the telescopes guiding system; I became more and more perplexed with C. E. Macket & Co and
how in the world did this telescope having been made in England ever find its way to America.
I contacted the Antique Telescope Society by placing a post on the Oldscope yahoo website concerning the instrument with a link to
plenty of pictures but received no response. Finally an attempt was made by placing the images and some general information on
the Amateur Astronomer Association of Pittsburgh's List server.
Dave Smith posted the request and we received an e-mail fro a former Woodland Hills High School student - John Hartman. Mr.
Hartman explained he attended the High School in 1963 when it first opened, but was unaware of the telescope.
He also suggested we contact Lee Schaefer the High School's former Physics teacher. Here is an account of what Mr. Schaefer had
to say:
" The best source of information about the scope would be Churchill's
first astronomy instructor - Bob Mousseau.
He approached the course from the mathamaical/physics point of view.
One of his tests was to give students an object and they had to use the
tables, calculate the sidereal time and point the telescope with the
dome closed. He would then open the dome and grade them on how many
degrees off they were.
My recollections in no particular order:
The scope was purchased through the NSF program and I believe it came from the private observatory of an English baron who
went bankrupt and sold it. The school only had to pay $50 for a change order for the
architect to add the doom to the roof. The problem is that since it was added as an afterthought, the doom sits on
the roof with no supporting structure underneath. Consequently, if you take a photographic time exposure, you can see the
vibration of a truck going down Greensburg Pike or someone slamming a door in the building.
The mount would get out of alignment and before any serious
photography, we had to align it on the pole star. One night as I was doing this,a meteor past through the filed of view. I bet I'm one
of the few people to have ever seen one with a scope that big!
The scope was too long and I this was corrected by cutting about a foot off the end before I arrived.
The cut off piece was in the physics stockroom for years.
As one of the physics instructors (the other was Bob Mc Afoos) I became the resident scope technician.
I spent hours working on the scope, dome and doors and they never paid me a cent - but it was a lot of fun. I believe I replaced
those motors many years ago. They are standard low RPM 60 HZ synchronous motors and
should not be hard to find or replace. The critical one is that sky tracker but the advance motor can be any
speed.
Jayson marks the position of the worm gear to check for movement against the drive housing.
One of our the first projects was to remove the stair railing and
install the trap door since the railing blocked the prime viewing area for the moon and planets.
I'm not sure about the sharpness of the lens but the flair levels were fairly low. There are some bubbles in the optical glass! We
started fooling with it, the image seemed rather poor and I discovered that
water and dirt had gotten between the two elements of the objective lens. After a careful cleaning, it looked
much better. One year the guidance department put a special ed girl in my physics class. She could not do the physics but was
great in home etcso I gave her the assignment of making a waterproof cover for the scope.
We bought an "astro camera" that projected the image onto a 3"X4" film
holder and was great for taking pictures of the moon but not much else.
It's main problem was focus since the back of the camera which had a
ground glass screen almost touched the
wall. The other problem was that the best night for astro-photography
in the 'Burg is when the temperature is below zero! It was handy
having the darkroom adjacent to the observatory.
Later, I bought an adapter for the AV Department's Nikon F camera and
that worked much better. The field of view was about 1/4 of the moon.
One night I happened to notice that Jupiter was low on the horizon and
the sky was clear so I fired up the scope and got a great image of the moons. When I showed a print to Mr.
Mousseau, he wanted me to try the next night to show his students how much the moons moved. By some stroke of luck we had
nine straight nights of clear sky in Pittsburgh. I made up sets of the images and the students used these to calculate the orbital
periods to with in a few percent of the accepted values.
Unfortunately, this scope is only good for the moon and planets. Other objects are viewable but very faint. We always thought that
it would have been better for instructional use to have constructed a "viewing deck" and bought several Queststar scopes.
To show of the scope for parent's nigh open house, I made an adapter to attach one of our 2/3" Sony vidicon cameras to the scope
and had a TV set in the hall. The camera would show about 1/3 of the moon and made a
spectacular picture.
I also made a wide field scope using the
18" F4 lens from an opaque projector and
a 4"X5" film holder on the back. This contraption
could piggy back on the main scope which became
the viewfinder.
Another adapter that I constructed was an adapter
to mount a photo multiplier tube that I scrounged
from Westinghouse Research. The tricky part was
building a 1000V power supply. It had a jacket to
cool it with dry ice. It could measure the luminosity
of stars reliably down to about seventh magnitude.
Penn Hills put in a planetarium in their high school
about the same time. Mr. Mousseau and the PH
instructor wanted to cooperate & have the students
from both schools use our scope on clear nights
and go over to PH on cloudy nights. Unfortunately,
the PH school board would not allow the to do that!
They sad the PH students could go to CAHS but
because the PH tax payers had paid for their
planetarium, no one else was allowed to use it!
After the PH instructor left, they could never find
another teach who could run the system so they
removed it and converted the area into a TV studio
If you need some help fixing the place up, let me
know. I still know most of the spots that need
some oil!" - Lee Schaefer
