Tranparent Dome
I have always admired other people's "Tranparent Dome" pictures and after trying this at our Sutherland Observatory I was a little dissapointed with the results. The problem being that quatorially mounted telescopes sit very "deep" in their domes with only the top part of the telescope showing. While visiting Boyden Observatory near Bloemfontein in August 1994 as part of a team to evaluate the site with the aim of getting it back to a working observatory again, I saw an opportunity for taking such a picture. The ideal vantage point being from the roof of the aluminising facility which was nice and high and so close that I had to use a 28mm wide angle lens. The telescope here is South Africa's 2nd largest, the 60" Rockefeller reflector. If you look closely, just visible to the left of the control room is the (upright, white) tube of the famous 10" Metcalf photographic refractor which was instrumental in Henrietta Leavitt's discovey of the Cepheid Period-Luminosity relationship.
to Willie's Gallery