| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office.
Washburn Observatory, on the crest of Observatory Hill, commands not just an expansive view of the heavens above, but also a spectacular view of Lake Mendota below. A local architect designed the Italianate building on a modest residential scale, using locally quarried sandstone blocks, chiseled with a vermiculated surface and laid with beaded mortar joints, above rock-faced stones at the foundation. A bracketed and denticulated cornice and a triangular pediment ornament the building. The simple shed-roofed porch at the east wing and the octagonal bay window facing south seem domestic, but on the west, a wooden dome rising forty-eight feet in height identifies the building as an observatory. A large triangular pediment, broken by a stylized Palladian window, marks the observatory’s entrance.
Inside, a narrow wooden staircase ascends to the dome, where the original telescope remains. Constructed by Alvan Clark and Sons of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the refracting telescope was the country’s third largest telescope when it was installed in 1879.
In its heyday, the observatory was a leading astronomical research center. James Craig Watson, the first director and one of the most distinguished American astronomers of his time, measured binary stars, studied of the earth’s rotation and atmosphere as causes of aberrant astronomical observations, and discovered twenty-three asteroids. In the 1920s, observatory directors Joel Stebbins and Albert Edward Whitford created the field of astronomical photometry, which measures the light from stars. The observatory, closed in 1959, opens its doors regularly for public stargazing. |
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