Henry Draper's Astrograph (1891) (IMAGE)
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The Draper telescope is one of the world's first astrographs, or photographic recorders of celestial sphere phenomena. It was built in 1891 as a 'memorial' to the prematurely deceased American spectroscopic physicist Henry Draper, with which his wife Anna Maria supported the Harvard Observatory's ambitious programme, led by Edward C. Pickering, to develop a catalogue of photographic and photovisual brightnesses of stars and their spectral classification. More than 60,000 photometric and spectral images of the sky were taken with this telescope in Cambridge, and it contributed so much to Pickering's intention that the compiled inventory containing almost a quarter of a million stars was called the Henry Draper catalogue. The 'HD' star designations are still used today and are familiar to all astronomers around the world.
How did Draper's astrograph find its way to Piwnice (Poland)? In autumn 1947, the construction of the first observatory pavilion of the NCU Astronomical Observatory with a rotating dome of five metres in diameter began. Two years later, an astrograph sent from Cambridge stood there and, after the necessary adaptations, began regular observational work.
Today this interesting monument, unique in the world, has become an attraction for visitors to the NCU Institute of Astronomy in Piwnice.
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Andrzej Romanski/UMK
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