Patrick Comerford
Walking through the Museum Gardens in York to the Sung Eucharist in Saint Olave’s Church on Sunday morning, I was aware of the Lunar Eclipse that evening, and I was hoping the bus journey back to Milton Keynes was not going to miss the opportunity to see the eclipse.
Perhaps that is why I noticed York Observatory in the centre of Museum Gardens, facing the Yorkshire Museum. The octagonal observatory was built in 1833, and it is the oldest working observatory in Yorkshire.
The building has an distinctive cone-shaped roof, rotating roof with doors in the roof for the telescope. It was designed by John Sme in this way because it was easier to build than a hemispherical or domed roof.
Leading astronomers based in York in the 1780s included John Goodricke (1764-1786) and his neighbour and distant cousin Edward Pigott (1753-1825), who laid the foundations of variable star astronomy or the study of stars of varying brightness. Goodricke, who has a college at the University of York named after him, is known for his observations of the variable star Algol (Beta Persei) in 1782; Pigott was the first Englishman to discover a comet and then have it named after him.
The York Observatory was the result of a promise made at the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in the Yorkshire Museum in 1831. The vice president of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Revd William Pearson (1767-1847), gave a personal undertaking that if an observatory was built in York he would personally supply the telescope.
The observatory was built by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in 1833, and, in time, Pearson not only supplied the telescope but also provided other scientific instruments, including a clock.
One reason for building a small observatory in a city centre was not actually astronomical but for timekeeping. Time was often expressed in a vague sense. For example, people would wait for the ‘morning stagecoach’ rather than one due at a specific time. The advent of the industrial age and the railways, however, meant people needed greater accuracy when it came to their timekeeping.
Pearson’s clock, which was made in 1811, 20 years before the observatory was built, is still in place and is still always 4 minutes 20 seconds, behind Greenwich Mean Time: the longitude od the observatory is 1o 5' 12" west and its latitude is 53o 57' 40". It tells the time based on observations of the positions of stars. In its day, it was the most accurate timepiece in York and people were charged 6d each to check their timepieces against it.
The 4 inch refracting telescope in the observatory was built in 1850 by Thomas Cooke (1807-1868), the optical instrument maker of York, who later made the then-largest telescope in the world. It was installed in 1981 when the observatory was restored.
All the major astronomical events in the 19th and 20th centuries were seen from York Observatory, although no major discoveries were made from it.
After World War II, however, the building fell into disrepair and the original telescope disappeared some time in the 1950s. By the 1970s the York Observatory was in danger of demolition. But a public campaign raised £50,000 to restore it in 1981. Today the observatory is regularly open to the public, staffed by volunteers on behalf of York Museums Trust.
And – yes – we did get to see the lunar eclipse on Sunday night, not in an observatory, but at Newport Pagnell after we go off the coach from York.
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