An 'eclectic club'

Nearly 1,000 amateur telescope makers gathered on Thursday, Aug. 4 in Springfield for the launch of the three-day, 81st annual Stellafane Convention.

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2016-08-05 / Front Page An ‘eclectic club’ Annual Stellafane Convention brings telescope enthusiasts to Springfield By Tory Jones Bonenfant toryb@eagletimes.com Allen Hall of Ellington, Connecticut displays his telescope, Castor, which took eight years to build. Hall was up at the Stellafane clubhouse on Thursday, Aug. 4, for the 2016 Stellafane Convention. — TORY JONES BONENFANT Allen Hall of Ellington, Connecticut displays his telescope, Castor, which took eight years to build. Hall was up at the Stellafane clubhouse on Thursday, Aug. 4, for the 2016 Stellafane Convention. — TORY JONES BONENFANT SPRINGFIELD — Nearly 1,000 amateur telescope makers gathered on Thursday, Aug. 4 in Springfield for the launch of the three-day, 81st annual Stellafane Convention. Activities took place at the Hartness House Inn’s convention center, including tours of the underground telescope museum and Hartness Equatorial Turret Telescope, and up on Breezy Hill in Springfield, the home of Stellafane, the telescope built in 1923 by the Springfield Telescope Makers (STM) and the building’s namesake. One of the participants at Hartness House on Thursday was Ken Spencer, a former Connecticut resident who now lives in Seacliff, New York. “In the old days, if you needed a telescope, you made your own,” Spencer said. It is his 27th year attending the Stellafane convention. At the Hartness House Inn, convention-goers were busy with a “Sub-Arc-Second Spatial Resolution Imaging” workshop led by Thomas Spirock, chair of this year’s event and a member of the Springfield telescope club. Don Lorrain with the Los Angeles Astronomical Society and STM President David Tabor welcomed the group to the workshop, which included presentations on Mercury and Venus, high-resolution planetary imaging, and a session called “Robo-AO: The First Robotic Adaptive Optics Instrument,” among several other topics. About 900-1,000 participants traveled to this year’s convention, Spirock said. Hartness House employee Travis West was in the underground tunnel and museum on Thursday, and said Stellafane participants had been taking tours. The museum includes several linked rooms and is the former workspace of homeowner James Hartness, who was a former Vermont governor, president of Jones and Lamson Machine Co., past president of the American Society of Techanical Engineers, and an amateur astronomer. Brad Vietje, a past president of STM, said that he has attended Stellafane for about 35 years. The underground space was not only a workshop but also a speakeasy in the 1920s, he said, with a second exit for people to evacuate when police were called. The museum belongs to the Hartness House, and the equipment housed there belongs to Stellafane, he said. Stellafane’s history goes back to early in the 20th century. Springfield resident Russell Porter, a friend of Hartness, offered in 1920 to help a group of Springfield machine tool factory workers to build their own telescopes, grinding and polishing mirrors and constructing them. By 1923, the group had formed the club known as STM and built the telescope and clubhouse on Breezy Hill. Vietje said that in 1925, when an editor for Scientific American heard of the “eclectic club” in Springfield, he invited Porter to write an article. “There were so many letters to the editor that came back,” that the first article led to a series of articles in the publication, he said. People from all over the country began reading the series and making their own telescopes, including a “farm boy” from Kansas who had built a 9-inch diameter telescope and had been sketching his findings, Vietje said. When the boy read in a local newspaper that astronomers were searching for “Planet X,” he contacted them and they agreed to look at his notebook. When they saw what he had found, they “immediately hired him to work in the observatory” in Arizona. That boy was Clyde Tombaugh, who went on to discover Pluto, Vietje said. Tombaugh came to Stellafane in 1987, where Vietje met him. Up on the hill at Stellafane’s bright pink clubhouse and headquarters, which is a national landmark, telescope aficionados from several states gathered on Thursday afternoon with their children and grandchildren for a picnic and to display a wide variety of commercially-made and handmade telescopesl. The clubhouse itself houses three telescopes. Francis O’Reilly, an attorney from New York who also makes telescopes and gives a telescope workshop, said Porter had donated the land on which Stellafane sits to the club in 1922. He said some of the telescopes on the site were made by hand, including small parts such as the screws holding the apparatus together. Travis Russell, 12, was on the hill with his grandfather David Kelly of East Hampton, Massachusetts. Kelly, a senior member of the club, has been attending the convention for 47 consecutive years, since 1969, he said. Also on the site were Allen Hall of Ellington, Connecticut, with his telescope Castor, which took eight years to build. Nearby was Castor’s “twin” telescope, Pollux, built by Hall’s friend Richard “Dick” Parker. Telescope enthusiast Jay Drew of Eastland, Connecticut, who was standing nearby, called Castor “the funnest amateur project in history.” Other activities at the convention include telescope-making and several other demonstrations, field walks, solar system walks, telescope making for teens, an optical telescope competition and a mechanical telescope competition, and speakers. Keynote speaker for 2016 is NASA astrophysicist “Mr. Eclipse” Fred Espenak. New on the hillside this year, a project is underway to build a spectrohelioscope, which would allow users to look at the sun in various different wavelengths, O’Reilly said. The Stellafane Convention takes place Thursday, Aug. 4 through Sunday, Aug. 7 in Springfield, co-hosted by the Hartness House Inn. For more information, visit stellafane.org.