Fuertes Observatory
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| Organization | Cornell University | ||||||||
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| Location | Ithaca, New York (United States) | ||||||||
| Coordinates | 42°27′10″N 76°28′28.16″W / 42.45278°N 76.4744889°WCoordinates: 42°27′10″N 76°28′28.16″W / 42.45278°N 76.4744889°W | ||||||||
| Altitude | 274 m | ||||||||
| Established | 1917 | ||||||||
| Website | Fuertes Website | ||||||||
| Telescopes | |||||||||
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| Irving Porter Church Memorial Telescope | 30 cm (12") Brashear refractor on Warner & Swasey mount. |
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| Obsession 15" | 38 cm (15") Obsession Newtonian reflector on Dobsonian altazimuth mount |
| Celestron C-14 | 35 cm (14") Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector on equatorial fork mount |
| Meade LX200 | 30 cm (12") Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector on tripod. |
Fuertes Observatory is an astronomical observatory located on the North Campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The observatory was completed in fall of 1917 and was originally used by the Civil Engineering Department as an instructional field office for navigation and surveying. Today, the observatory is primarily used for public outreach, welcoming over two thousand visitors per year with open houses on clear Friday nights.
The facility is currently maintained by the Cornell Department of Astronomy, though open houses are routinely managed by the Cornell Astronomical Society, a group of Cornell undergraduates, graduate students, and Ithaca citizens. The observatory is named after Estevan Fuertes.
Several observatories existed on Cornell's Central Campus in the later part of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th century. However, due to the development of the campus and the need to build a drill hall (Barton Hall), the predecessors to Fuertes were demolished, and plans were made to build a new observatory on the undeveloped North Campus. In 1916, construction of the Fuertes Observatory began under the supervision of the Cornell Department of Civil Engineering. The building was completed in 1917 with a 24-foot-diameter steel dome; 30-foot-long I-beams were incorporated to provide support for a future telescope. This differed from the typical masonry pier used to support a telescope in most observatories.
The first telescope in the dome room of Fuertes was a 4.5-inch refractor telescope used in some of Cornell's previous observatories, and was mounted on an equatorial clock-driven mount. Soon after, in 1919, Civil Engineering Professor Irving Porter Church acquired two glass blanks from the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. The glass blanks were ground and polished into a 12-inch achromatic lens by Brashear & Co in 1920. Professor Church spearheaded a campaign to raise money from civil engineering alumni to build the telescope and equatorial mounting. In January 1922, the order was placed with the Warner & Swasey Company to build the equatorial mount. After modifications were made to the original dome, the telescope was installed during the summer and fall of 1922, and was completed on October 16, 1922. It was officially dedicated on June 15, 1923 as the “Irving Porter Church Memorial Telescope.”
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