Field trips are adventures grade schoolers eagerly anticipate. When I was a student at IPS No. 57, annual field trips initially included the Childrens’ Museum (the old house on N. Meridian St. crammed with stuff), the President Benjamin Harrison Home, and the James Whitcomb Riley Home. Later, the newly completed Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium on the Butler University campus was added.
My first visit to the Holcomb Observatory was not to peer at the heavens through the giant 38-inch reflector telescope, but to look at projections of the night sky in the planetarium. Since I had an Indianapolis Star route, I was able to observe, while delivering the paper, the myriad of stars and the occasional flash of a shooting star (meteor) piercing the darkness of the early morning sky. This time also was before the city’s light pollution dimmed the cosmos; constellations — the Big Dipper and Orion — the planets, and the moon vividly stood out against the black sky. It was also a time when man-made objects began to arc the firmament. To hear and see a planetarium program helped me to further my understanding of what I observed daily.
For seventy years since August 1954, Butler’s Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium has provided educational programs for Indianapolis area children and adults, most recently leading up to and during the total solar eclipse. Over the years, thousands of visitors have entered the Indiana limestone building, crossed the terrazzo floor with its large colorful images of the zodiac, to either see a celestial show in the planetarium during the day or in the evening, in groups of two or three, to ascend the stairs along the wall to the telescope platform and view the craters of the moon.
While today’s observatory and reflector telescope were gifts of Indianapolis industrialist James Irving Holcomb, what is the story of the 6-inch refractor telescope mounted on the side of the giant telescope?
It wasn’t until the early 1870s that residents of Indianapolis had a public opportunity to view the celestial mysteries of the heavens through a telescope. In 1872, Dr. Oscar F. Fitch, a teacher in Morristown, Indiana and “an astronomer of great ability,” bought a thirteen-foot-long reflector telescope with a 9¼-inch diameter object glass which, at the time, was the largest traveling instrument in the United States. From time to time, Dr. Fitch brought the telescope to the Hoosier Capital, setting the mammoth device up around the center of the city — on the northeast corner of Washington and Meridian Streets and the southwest corner of the courthouse yard. For a fee of 25 cents, people could see the “sun with its wonderful spots, the moon with its craters and mountains, Jupiter with its moons and cloud belts, and Saturn with its brilliant rings.”
Stargazers eagerly anticipated a rare appearance of the transit of Venus on December 6, 1882 and the Fitch telescope provided an excellent viewing platform. A limited number of ticket holders gathered around the telescope on the courthouse yard on the appointed day while thousands of others prepared to view this natural phenomenon through smoked glass. However, “the transit was a failure here” and those seeking to see Venus across the solar disc were “bitterly disappointed by the gathering clouds, which shut the heavens from sight.” Dr. Fitch continued to come to Indianapolis and set up his telescope for nighttime viewing of the moon, planets, constellations like the nebula in Orion, and the “grandeur of the Miky Way.” He also took the telescope to Irvington, making it available to Prof. William Thrasher’s astronomy classes at Butler University.
By the mid-1880s, a local Astronomical Society was formed with patent attorney Charles P. Jacobs as president. An avid amateur astronomer, Jacobs had a refractor telescope with a 4-inch glass installed in an observatory at his home, 601 N. Delaware. Also, at this time in addition to the Jacobs telescope and the traveling Fitch telescope, city residents had another celestial viewing opportunity when Arthur S. Hickley, 427 N. Tennessee St. (Capitol Ave.), an electrician with Jenney Electric Co, acquired a reflecting telescope with a focal length of 12-foot, 3-inch and a 16-inch mirror and had it mounted on a 16-foot platform in his backyard.
Probing the mysteries of the starry canopy over Indianapolis was further enhanced in 1889 when the directors of Butler University, with a gift made by Joseph L. Irwin, purchased a refractor telescope with an “object lens six inches in diameter and a focal length of eight feet” from the estate of Robert McKim. McKim had obtained the telescope in 1883 from Alvan Clark & Sons of Boston, makers of astronomical instruments, and had it placed in an observatory next to his home in Madison, Indiana. This was the first astronomical observatory in Indiana.
Within months of acquiring the McKim telescope, the Irwin Observatory was built on the high ground in the northeast corner of Butler’s Irvington campus. An octagonal structure, standing on a deep foundation, the observatory was sided with sheet-iron and the precision optical instrument was placed “on a pedestal, which stands on a column of brick and stone.” A revolving dome, with a sliding panel, provided an “unobstructed sky-view from horizon to zenith.” For almost four decades those wishing to gaze upon the wonders of the universe entered the small observatory, climbed the ladder to a roost to peer through the telescope. A lever was activated, and the domed roof moaned and groaned as it rotated until the open panel showed the section of the sky to be seen. Students, school children, Irvington people and others viewed the craters of the Moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. Lunar and solar eclipses, comets and meteor showers, and nebulae in constellations struck awe in those who contemplated the mysteries.
When Butler moved to its new northside campus at Fairview Park, the McKim telescope was packed away for its journey from Irvington and the observatory building was razed leaving only the foundation. In the mid-thirties, the telescope was remounted and placed on the roof of Jordan Hall for day and night classes studying the heavens and during special celestial events like a lunar eclipse viewing was open to the public until it was attached to the reflector telescope in the new Holcomb Observatory.
