Harvard College Observatory

The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and was founded in 1839. With the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, it forms part of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

HCO houses a collection of approximately 500,000 astronomical plates taken between the mid-1880s and 1989 (with a gap from 1953–68). This 100-year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe. The Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard project is digitally scanning and archiving these photographic plates.

History

In 1839, the Harvard Corporation voted to appoint William Cranch Bond, a prominent Boston clockmaker, as "Astronomical Observer to the University" (at no salary). This marked the founding of the Harvard College Observatory. HCO's first telescope, the 15-inch Great Refractor, was installed in 1847. That telescope was the largest in the United States from installation until 1867.

Harvard College

Harvard College is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees (the other being Harvard Extension School). Founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world.

History

The "New College" came into existence in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court (colonial legislature, second oldest in British America) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—though without a single building, instructor, or student. In 1638, the college became home for North America's first known printing press, carried by the ship John of London. Three years later the college was renamed in honor of deceased Charlestown minister John Harvard (1607–1638) who had bequeathed to the school his entire library and half of his monetary estate.

Harvard's first instructor, schoolmaster Nathaniel Eaton (1610–1674), was also its first instructor to be dismissed—in 1639, for overstrict discipline. The school's first students were graduated in 1642. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, (c. 1643–1666), a native/indigenous American, "from the Wampanoag … did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period."