page_title: Yerkes Observatory
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Yerkes Observatory / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Yerkes Observatory located Williams Bay, United States of America rear side
context_page_description: Yerkes Observatory is an astronomical observatory located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, U.S.A. It was operated by the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from its founding in 1897 to 2020. Ownership was transferred to the non-profit Yerkes Future Foundation in May, 2020.
  The observatory, sometimes called "the birthplace of modern astrophysics", was founded in 1892 by astronomer George Ellery Hale and financed by businessman Charles T. Yerkes.
  It represented a shift in the thinking about observatories, from their being mere housing for telescopes and observers, to the early-20th-century concept of observation equipment integrated with laboratory space for physics and chemistry analysis.
  The observatory's main dome houses a 40-inch diameter doublet lens refracting telescope, the largest refractor ever successfully used for astronomy. Two smaller domes house 40 in and 24 in reflecting telescopes. There are several smaller telescopes - some permanently mounted - that are primarily used for educational purposes. The observatory also holds a collection of over 170,000 photographic plates.
context_section_description: The largest telescope in the World would, ten years later, be the Harvard 60-inch Reflector ( 1.524 m 60″), which came online in 1905 at Harvard College Observatory, USA. Then in 1908, Mount Wilson Observatory matched that size with a 60-inch reflector of their own, and throughout the 20th century, increasingly larger reflectors would be established, aided also by refinements to mirror technology— vapor-deposited aluminum on low-thermal expansion glass, pioneered for the 200 inch (5 meter) Hale telescope of 1948. In the latter years of the 20th century, space observatories also marked a major advance, and somewhat less than a century after Yerkes, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 2.4 meter reflector, was launched. Small refractors remain popular for astronaut photography, although issues with chromatic aberration were never really entirely solved for the lens. (Isaac Newton had solved this with the reflecting design, although the refactors are not without their merits.)
  The renaissance-esque grounds and architecture, murals, and statues of the premiere 19th century great observatories, with their extraordinary great telescopes; the Yerkes facility was described as "castle-like". For example, the Yerkes Observatory was built on a 77-acre grounds, with artistically designed landscaping. The visually remarkable extremely long tubes and elaborate domes and mounts provided an egg of knowledge that astronomers and the public flocked to for knowledge about the stars. The Yerkes grounds have landscaping designed by Olmstead, for example. Great advancements such as astrophotography and the discovery of nebulas and different types of stars provided a major advance in this period. The importance of finely crafted mounts matched to a large aperture, harnessing the power of the basic equations of the telescopes design to bring the heavens into closer, brighter examination increased humankind's understanding of space and Earth's place in the Galaxy. Among the accomplishments, Kuiper discovered that Saturn's Moon Titan has an atmosphere.
caption: Panorma of the Observatory building, 2016
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