- Larry Adkins
- Rancho Santiago College District
- Santa Ana, California
Mr. Bishop's Telescope 1923 -
1930
The 8" Alvan
Clark refractor of the Bishop Observatory inspired and instructed students
of Santa Ana College (SAC) for more than three generations.
The college is located in the city of Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange
County, immediately south of Los Angeles. Although the telescope has been in the possession of the college for over
half a century, it was originally owned by amateur astronomer Clyde Bishop
who built an observatory for it at his home in Lemon Heights (above
photo). Mr. Bishop (1875 - 1927) was a well known Orange County
attorney in the early years of the twentieth century and was very active
in civic affairs. His biography, given in The History of
Orange County (1921)1 , speaks of a solid
citizen, the head of a successful law firm, twice elected to public
office on the Republican ticket (state assemblyman), and, for a time, city
attorney for the city of Orange. Despite these solidly conservative
credentials, the early part of his life appears to have been rather
adventurous. At the age of twenty he left the family farm outside Orange
and joined a traveling theater company as an actor. Exactly how long
he pursued this profession is not known, but long enough to tour and
perform on both coasts and south into Mississippi. His theatrical
career came to an end when he was stirred by the call to arms at the onset
of the Spanish - American war and volunteered for the army. He saw
no action, however, serving out his enlistment at the Presidio in San
Francisco.
After
leaving the army, he returned to Orange County where he studied law as an
apprentice at the law firm of McKelvey and Montgomery in Santa Ana.
By 1902 he had established his own law office and began his rise as a
"pillar of the community". Exactly when he acquired an interest in
astronomy is not known, but he clearly was in contact with Jennie Lasby
(later Tessmann) almost as soon as she began her teaching career at Santa
Ana Junior College in 1919. This can be surmised from the fact that
Ms. Lasby is known to have served as Bishop's "technical advisor" in the
selection of the telescope and in the construction of the observatory
which was initiated shortly after her arrival in Orange County2
.
I think
that the case can be made that Jennie Lasby was the major influence in
Bishop's acquiring the telescope and equipping the observatory. Ms.
Lasby was a first rate professional astronomer, in the first group of
women hired by George Ellery Hale to work at Mt. Wilson, and co-author
with future observatory director Walter Adams of a pioneering
work on solar spectroscopy 3 . She was
subsequently offered positions with J. C. Kapteyn in Germany (thwarted by
World War I) and at the University of Chicago, but she chose to move to
Santa Ana to be near her ailing parents. Ms. Lasby received her
undergraduate degree from Carleton College in Minnesota and her master's
degree from Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She worked in the
observatories of both of these institutions (Goodsell at Carleton and
Williston at Mt. Holyoke), and they both had 8" Alvan Clark refractors
4
. It would appear that Mr. Bishop was advised to install a modern
(1920s) version of these academic observatories at his home. The
earlier telescopes were research grade instruments, equipped with
spectroscopes, camera attachments and Herschel wedges for solar
observing. The Bishop observatory's 8" refractor had all of these
accessories, making it the equal of the institutional instruments.
Ms. Lasby makes it clear in several articles published in the 1930s that
she expected to do serious work with the Bishop telescope. I have
been unable to locate the original spectroscope or the camera attachment,
but the Herschel wedge is still in the eyepiece
box.
According to
Mabel Sterns' Directory of Astronomical Observatories in the United
States 5 , the observatory was built in 1923, a "Concrete
building with a motor-driven steel dome". The 1923 date may refer to
the telescope's manufacture (see below), since real estate records
indicate that the house itself was not occupied until sometime in 1926. The
estate was clearly something of a showpiece in the mostly rural Orange County of the 1920s,
as evidenced by a featured pictorial in the real estate section of the Santa Ana Register
dated November 18, 1926
(Lemon
Heights Residences Rank Among the Southland's Most
Attractive)6 . A concrete pier firmly anchored in the
ground was provided to support the mounting. This pier was isolated from
the structure of the house to insure that vibrations were not transmitted
to the telescope. Although the observatory was moved from Lemon Heights in
1940, as late as 1999 a portion of the pier still remained intact at the Bishop
estate7 (the house has since
been completely renovated and the remaining section of the pier
removed).
I have not
been able to locate a period photograph which gives an overview of
the completed telescope on its mounting. However, I can attest
that when it was operational in the1980s it looked virtually identical to the
accompanying illustration which is from the authoritative Alvan
Clark & Sons, Artists in Optics by Deborah Jean Warner and
Robert B. Ariail8 . The distinctive feature of the telescope is the
mounting which the company called the "Universal Observatory Mount, Type
B". Warner and Ariail state that this mount was very rare and only a
handful were ever built. Its distinguishing feature is the horseshoe
shaped casting which supports the polar axis and is large enough to hold a
right ascension setting circle of considerable diameter. The clock
drive was electrically driven with a governor to regulate the speed.
Overall, the mounting is very similar to a design offered a few years
later by Warner and Swasey. The telescope was equipped with
three eyepieces, along with the previously mentioned spectroscope, camera
attachment and Herschel wedge.
The 8"
objective lens is an achromatic f/15 doublet and is identical to the one
prepared for Manuel Grno de Castresano of Arequipa, Peru. The
technical details for the Arequipa lens are given on page 259 of the
notebook in which Robert Lundin (the Clark corporation's chief optician)
kept a record of every Alvan Clark objective made from 1882 to
19279. At the bottom of this page is the notation: "C. Bishop's
same glass and curves as above". The page is dated January 7,
1924, implying that the actual fabrication of the Arequipa objective was in 1923.
Since the Bishop notation was clearly added later, the fabrication date
for the Bishop lens is less certain, although the lack of a separate entry
implies that it was made at about the same time. It appears
that the glass blanks were from a new vendor, since there is a brief
notation on the page margins which states "The material is entirely
different from any I have record of ". The data in the notebook
suggest that the unknown
characteristics of the glass led to an error in the original curvature,
and the lens had to be reground to achieve the desired color correction
and focal length. Since the Arequipa lens was ground and polished first,
there would have been no need for a similar learning curve with the Bishop objective.
The date of
1923 is significant in accessing the optical quality of the objective
lens. Alvan Clark and his sons, George and Alvan Graham, were
the premier American telescope makers of the late 19th century, probably
the finest in the world, and builders of the two largest refractors
ever made, the 36" at Lick and the 40" at Yerkes. The definitive
history of this telescope making family and their company is given
by Warner and Ariail (op. cit.). All of
the Clarks were dead by the turn of the twentieth century, but the
master optician C. A. R Lundin who had been hired by Alvan Clark in 1874
remained to carry on the tradition of fine optical craftsmanship.
Lundin's son Robert, a skilled optician trained by his father, was in
charge of the company's optical department in the 1920s. However, by
the 1930s the company was in decline. Lundin had left, and the
historic grinding tools and other equipment were disposed of in an early
World War II scrap metal drive. The fact that the Bishop telescope
dates from 1923 means that the lens might well have been polished and
figured by Robert Lundin himself who, among other things, polished and
figured the 13 inch camera lens for Lowell Observatory with which Clyde
Tombaugh discovered Pluto10.
Exactly what use was made of the telescope in the early years is not
known. It was definitely involved in variable star work by
1929, but there is no evidence that it was used for this purpose in
the first few years of its operation. There is an article in a 1941
issue of El Don (SAC student newspaper) that states
that students began visiting the observatory in 1926 (Telescope in
Action for 15 Years)11 , but earliest record
of a student field trip to Lemon Heights I have been able to find is
193012. At any rate, this initial period of the observatory's
history came to an abrupt end on October 31, 1927 when Clyde Bishop died
unexpectedly at the age of 52. His death merited a front page
obituary with a large headline in the Santa Ana
Register13. His enthusiasm for
astronomy and the fact that he had built an observatory at his home was
mentioned, though no further details were given. That same year
(1927) Jennie Lasby traveled to Germany and married John Tessmann, a
German scientist and mathematician whom she had met on her first trip to
Europe on the eve of World War I.
Lemon Heights Nights 1930 -
1940
 |
Bishop Observatory in Lemon Heights
circa 1925-1930 (photo by Edward W. Cochems (c) Ronald Sand
) |
Clearly, Mrs. Tessmann was able to make arrangements
with Clyde Bishop's widow for the continued use of the observatory on a
regular basis for college astronomy classes. There are a
number of references in El Don to student field trips to
Lemon Heights beginning in 1930 and continuing for the next ten
years14. These articles indicate that trips were made on a weekly
basis. During this period Mrs. Bishop remarried and became Mrs. Anna
Bishop Tubbs. It is not known how much, if any, involvement Mrs.
Tubbs had with the observatory. Usually when an observatory
field trip is discussed in El Don, mention is made of
"telescope manager Walter J. Ferris", indicating that he, not Mrs.
Tubbs, was in charge of the instrument during visits by astronomy
classes.
I have not
been able to find the exact relationship Walter Ferris had with the
college, but Michael Saladyga, librarian at the American Association of
Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), has located records from the late
twenties and early thirties which confirm that Mr. Ferris was a variable
star observer who used the Bishop telescope for his
observations15. He submitted 66 variable star
observations (mostly of the long period Mira type) to AAVSO headquarters
between 1929 and 1931, and although his membership application stated that
he planned to work with both his own 8-inch reflecting telescope as well
as with the Clark refractor, it appears that in fact all of his reports
were done with the Clark. Mr. Ferris' AAVSO membership file lists
his profession as "Estimator", but he apparently had some official
connection to SAC, because in his observing reports after 1930 he
always adds the phrase "with Santa Ana Junior College" after his
name. Further, it is clear from both the press accounts mentioned
above and the notes he included in some of these reports, that helping
students use the telescope was part of his regular activities at the
observatory.
Three short notes
which Mr. Ferris attached to his observing reports provide a glimpse of
the Bishop Observatory in operation during this period. In
October, 1930 he reported "Stars of Mag 13.0 or over are too much for
this instrument and location. While on a hill some 6-1/2 miles from
my home it is only about 7 miles from the coast and the air is often heavy
with moisture and seeing poor." (This coastal marine layer
is still a problem for astronomers in the area, although it has been
supplanted in seriousness by urban light pollution.) A note in
January of 1931 clearly indicates that by this time student use of the
telescope was quite heavy: "...It has been a busy time with
classes at the telescope every clear available night and I had my hands
full.." Does it sound like he is not entirely enjoying this?
Finally in his report for November/December 1931 he has this to say:
"Sorry I could not do more this last summer but there has been many
conflicting things which hindered besides the cloudy weather. I have
the Junior College students at the observatory one night each week.
The observatory is the property of Mrs. John Tubbs who has made it
available to the Junior College and myself. It is about 7-1/2 miles
from town (I would be able to do more if it was at home.)." I
venture to guess that a modern amateur would consider a first class
observatory 7-1/2 miles from home to be virtually in the backyard, but at
the time, along winding country roads, I don't doubt that it seemed more
distant and certainly more inconvenient.
Walter
Ferris maintained his membership in the AAVSO until 1938, but there is no
record of further observing reports after 1931. He was still
associated with the telescope after it moved to Santa Ana in 1940,
but seems not to have been as much involved with supervising
students as he was a decade earlier. Victor Alleman, Santa Ana
College distinguished alumnus and benefactor, recalls field trips to
Lemon Heights with Mrs. Tessmann when he was a student in the late
thirties, but has no recollection of Walter Ferris16. Mr. Alleman
remembers how the students would carpool for the evening drive up into the
hills which were then separated from Santa Ana by a sea of citrus
groves. At the observatory Mrs. Tessmann would supervise while
students would observe and take notes. The pictures below show two
such groups of students at the observatory in 1937 and 1939,
respectively.
Mrs.
Tessmann's position as astronomy instructor at a junior college was
unusual for the times. Very few junior colleges of that era even
taught astronomy, let alone had regular access to a high quality
instrument like the Bishop observatory's 8" Clark refractor. In a
few articles from the period there are hints (unconfirmed) that she used
the telescope for spectroscopy in personal research projects17 .
Clearly, however, she used the observatory primarily to instruct her
classes. She was well liked by the students, though she tended to be
aloof. She signed a candid photograph of herself in Victor Alleman's
1941 yearbook with the cryptic inscription: "Not as cross as I look. Jennie L. Tessmann"18 . According to
Mr. Alleman, "That was about as warm as she got." Well, it was a
more formal era in academe. I doubt that any of her students ever
called her "Jennie".
Santa Ana High School 1940 -
1955
Mrs. Tubbs
died in February of 1940 and specified in her will that the 8" Clark
telescope be given to Santa Ana College "for the benefit of its astronomy
classes"19 . The only requirements asked of the college were
that observatory be removed from the Lemon Heights location within six
months after the close of probate and that the college assume liability
for any damage to the property arising from the removal process.
Santa Ana College president D. K. Hammond was happy to accept the gift and
the conditions. The article in the Santa Ana Register
which announced the bequest to the college acknowledged Mrs.
Tessmann's role in establishing the observatory. In that same
article President Hammond stated that "some heights, above the fog,
probably would be sought for a location" after the college took
possession. However, no doubt due to time and budget
constraints, any immediate plan to relocate to a remote site was obviously
abandoned, because by August of 1940, an observatory to house the
telescope was under construction on the campus of Santa Ana High
School20.
 |
 |
Observatory under construction
at Santa Ana High August, 1940 |
Observatory near the track and
field facilities of Santa High
School |
Why was the
telescope, always the property of Santa Ana College, installed
at Santa Ana High School? The answer lies in the fact that the high
school and the junior college shared the same campus from the college's
founding early in the century into the 1930s. Most of the college
functions were forced to move to new quarters some blocks away after the
earthquake of 1933, but this was a quite small campus and always
considered an intermediate step in relocating to a larger, permanent
site. The requirement to move the observatory from Lemon Heights
within six months in 1940 clearly called for an immediate temporary
solution, and the logical place was the high school with its more
expansive grounds. Needless to say, the onset of World War II put
all other plans on hold. After the war, the college moved to its
present location, and the intention was to transfer the observatory there
as soon as feasible. As it happened, the telescope remained at the
high school until 1955.
Several
interesting observations with the Clark refractor were reported in
El Don during its stay at Santa Ana High. On November
11, 1940 the telescope was used to observe the transit of Mercury across
the face of the sun, no doubt using the Herschel wedge still in the
accessory box today. This is a relatively rare event, the next such
transit visible from Santa Ana after 1940 was in 1973 and the most recent
occurred in 1999. The 1940 event was planned as more than a casual
observing session. The November 8, 1940 issue of El
Don21, reported that a student, Bruce Ragan, with assistance
from Mrs. Tessmann and Walter Ferris, was intending to time the transit
and report the results to the Naval Observatory in Washington.
According to this article, instructions had been received from the
observatory on the proper procedures required to produce meaningful
results. I was not able to find a follow up article, so we can only
speculate on the success of the operation. The following year
(October, 1941) the public was invited to view Mars, then experiencing one
of its closest oppositions. El Don reported that over
400 people lined up to see the red planet through the Clark
refractor22. That's quite a crowd, especially when you
consider that the population of Orange County in 1940 was less than 5% of
what it is today. The article implies that some in this enthusiastic
audience attempted to see "the peculiar 'canals' or dark lines running
from each of the pole caps of the body to a slightly greenish belt girding
the equatorial region". No reports of success here,
either.
A brief article in
1941 addresses the issue of "how far can you see?" with the 8"
telescope23. The author reports that the instrument is "
capable of bringing to observation the nebula Canis Vanatican
(sic), which is 1,100,000 light years distant. This
nebula is about the farthest object in space observable with the
telescope". This is surely a reference to the Whirlpool galaxy (M51)
in Canes Venatici. The stated distance is much shorter than the
current estimate, but the most interesting point to note here is that a
galaxy is still being referred to as a "nebula". By 1930 Edwin
Hubble had pretty much established a consensus among astronomers that
spiral nebulae were external galaxies. It is interesting to see here
that some ten years later the new terminology had not yet taken
hold.
 |
 |
Jennie Tessmann at the
observatory in 1946 |
Student Diana Edwards
observing with the telescope in
1954 |
Jennie
Tessmann retired from teaching in 1946. The picture on the left
above shows her at the telescope sometime during that same year. As
far as I can determine this is the last photograph of her at the
college. The caption along side the picture states again that the
telescope is equipped with a spectroscope and camera. As stated
above, the spectroscope and camera holder have since been lost, and
I have been unable to locate any photograph attributed to being taken with
the telescope.
17th and Bristol 1955 - 1967
In the fall of 1947 Santa Ana College
was formally relocated to a large tract of land on the corner of 17th and
Bristol streets, then a semi-rural intersection in the citrus groves west
of downtown. An aerial photograph from that year shows a collection
of war surplus barracks and a few recently constructed flat roof
structures flanked on three sides by orderly rows of orange and lemon
trees. The buildings were situated around the periphery of a circular
drive surrounding a citrus filled park.
 |

|
Observatory on new SAC campus.
By this time the central park of orange trees had been replaced with
buildings. |
Observatory close up
(1960) |
The
observatory was moved to the new campus in 1955 and located in an
undeveloped area south of the snack bar. At first this was considered
quite a satisfactory site, but the situation soon changed. By 1961
instructor David Hartman was complaining in El Don
about the flood of light generated by the recently constructed Horner
Plaza shopping center directly across 17th street from the
campus24. Even so, that same article reports that the observatory
was heavily used in astronomy classes and that every semester each
astronomy student spent two hours using the telescope. The article
goes on to describe how instructor Walter Brooks and some of his students
opened the observatory at 4:30 in the morning on March 9, 1961 to observe
the close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
 |
 |
Instructor David Hartman at
the controls in 1961 |
Dr. Walter G. Brooks observing
in 1963 |
In 1963 Dr. Brooks was still regularly using the telescope in his
classes and observing special events like a near conjunction of Venus with
the moon25. However, during this period the urbanization of
Orange County was rapidly accelerating, and Santa Ana College was
experiencing an explosive enrollment increase, along with the accompanying
need for new classroom and laboratory facilities. "Undeveloped"
areas of the campus were quickly becoming "developed" and the observatory
soon found itself surrounded by buildings, parking lots and lights which
were never extinguished. Change was in the air, and plans were
already underway for a new science building with the telescope
perched on the roof.
The Roof of Russell Hall 1967 -
1999
 |
 |
Observatory dome being hoisted
to the roof of Russell Hall 1966 |
Abandoned observatory July
2002 |
On March 12, 1967 Santa Ana College
held an open house for the public to show off its brand new science
complex. The three story main building containing classrooms and
laboratories was named Russell Hall for H. O. Russell, former physics
instructor at the college. Along side Russell Hall was a smaller
building housing a planetarium with a state of the art Spitz
projector. The planetarium was named for Jennie Tessmann who had
died eight years earlier in 1959. The Bishop observatory,
fitted with a new dome by AstroTech, now graced the roof of Russell Hall
and, in the words of the promotional announcement, was expected to have "a
commanding view of the stars"26.
The Tessmann
planetarium was an immediate success, instructing and entertaining college
classes, visiting students from other schools in the area, and the
general public. The fate of the Bishop observatory and the Clark
refractor was less happy. The roof top of Russell Hall proved
to be a most unsatisfactory location. It was always understood that
the lights from by now thoroughly urban Orange County would limit the
telescope's usefulness to the observation of bright objects like the moon
and planets. However, unlike its original site at the Bishop home,
no pier to isolate the mounting from the building was provided.
Under the best of circumstances the vibrations generated in a three story
building would have greatly reduced the telescope's effectiveness, but
compounding the problem was the fact that the observatory was surrounded
by the building's air conditioning system which was active at all
times. For most purposes the telescope was now useless.
My personal
involvement with the Bishop observatory began in 1979 when I was hired as
a part time lab instructor at the college. Once a semester I used to
take students to the roof to show them what a classic refracting telescope
looked like. If the weather conditions were right we attempted to
look at the moon or an available planet. At some point the eyepiece
holder had been modified to accept modern oculars, and occasionally, when
the air conditioning unit was recycling, a reasonably steady image could
be seen. There was a bit of chromatic aberration, something I have
observed even with more notable Clark refractors such as the 24" at Lowell
Observatory, but even so, these momentary lulls in vibration gave an
indication of the sharp, high contrast imaging capabilities of the
instrument.
There was an
attempt to damp out the vibrations by placing hard rubber "shock
absorbers" under the pier, but this produced no noticeable
improvement. To be honest, at this time there was not a great deal
of interest in upgrading the observatory by any of us, because by the late
seventies it seemed that technology had rendered the Clark refractor
irrelevant. Several times in articles published during the preceding
fifty years, writers had expressed pride and even awe at the fact that
Santa Ana College possessed such a fine instrument. For instance in
1941 the Clark was described as "the second best college-owned instrument
of its type in California, and surpasses even those owned by the state
universities"27. That statement might well have been true in
1941. However, by 1980 the Celestron corporation, among others, was
producing compact Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes with eight to ten inch
apertures at prices that would have seemed unbelievably low a few decades
earlier. Any reasonably endowed science department could now afford
several of these instruments, and, what is more, they were portable.
Dobsonian reflectors, arriving en mass a few years later,
were even cheaper and could be had in larger apertures. In short, by
the eighties no one was impressed by an eight inch telescope.
Yet in
appearance the Clark was most people's image of what a telescope should
be, with its long cannon barrel of a tube, its massive counterweighted
German equatorial mount, its temple-like dome. And then there was
the history associated with Alvan Clark & Sons, a name evocative of
the heroic era of American technology, master opticians, makers of the
world's largest lenses. Therefore, in the 1990s two attempts were made at relocating and
rehabilitating the observatory as a public facility. The first
proposal in 1992 was to create a public astronomy center in the middle of
Mile Square Park, part of the Orange County regional park system.
The telescope would be donated by the college, the building would be
erected by the county, and the staffing would be provided on a volunteer
basis by the Orange County Astronomers, one of the largest amateur
astronomy organizations in the United States. This fell through when
Orange County went bankrupt in 1994, terminating all funding for such
projects. The second attempt involved moving the telescope to
the Discovery Center, a hands-on science museum in Santa Ana aimed at
young people. The college officially transferred ownership to the
museum, and in 1999 telescope maker Dave Radosevich dismantled the Clark
in preparation for a complete refurbishing. However, this plan, too,
was abandoned when the directors at the Discovery Center concluded that
the antique telescope was not suitable for the purpose they had in mind, a
learning facility with a robust instrument which could be operated by
their youthful patrons with minimal supervision. Ownership of the
telescope was returned to Santa Ana College.
Into the 21st Century
In 1998 Mary Halverson (Dean of Science and Technology), Dr. Steve
Eastman (planetarium director) and Don Prescott (planetarium program
director) prepared a preliminary three part plan to modernize and
extend the functions of the Tessmann planetarium, now thirty years old and
showing its age28. The plan
called for a new projection system and new seating configuration in
the theater, followed by a remodeling of the planetarium building to house
a space science education center. The project was formally
launched with the approval of Peter Bostic, Santa Ana College Foundation
director, and the Foundation's other board members. With
the telescope back at the college, the current plan is to integrate
the observatory into the new complex, and to place it in a visually
prominent location near the planetarium building to serve as an
immediately recognizable symbol of the Space Science Education
Center. As of September 2002, funding is available for phase I
of the master plan, the projector upgrade, and is scheduled to be
completed within the next year. The telescope remains disassembled and in
storage, awaiting its rebirth.
Epilogue: One Special Observing
Session
In the last week of April,1986 Dave
Radosevich, Steve Kysor and I went to the roof of Russell Hall to make a
special observation with the 8" Clark. Dave and Steve had been
students of mine but were now skilled telescope makers with several awards
between them. As I recall, the night was not particularly good,
rather smoggy, and the telescope was full of the jitters as always.
However, we saw what we came to see: Halley's comet. Ever since
Edmond Halley determined its period to be 75 years, an average human life
span, each return of his comet has served as a celestial milepost on which
to reflect both on humanity's connection with the cosmos and on one's own
mortality as well. Unaware at that time of our telescope's history,
we thought for the sake of cosmic continuity we should make at least this
one observation just in case it had been used to view the comet during its
previous apparition in 1910. It is now clear that this telescope
missed the earlier date by a little over a decade, but I am still glad we
went up there that night. Of what value is an antique telescope? A
bridge to the past, certainly - the skill of the craftsmen who made it,
the aspirations of its many users. But a bridge to the future as
well. No, the 8" Clark didn't see Halley's comet in 1910, but it did
in 1986. In 2061 when Halley's comet is once again in the skies over
California, I'd like to think that someone will be at the eyepiece of Mr.
Bishop's telescope.
Current
Status of the Bishop Observatory and Clark
Refractor |
- I would like to express my appreciation to
Orange County historian Mr. Jim Sleeper who steered me toward a
number of fruitful references, to Mr. Victor Alleman who was kind
enough to share with me some of his reminiscences and inscriptions from
his yearbooks, to Sue Lindstedt, current owner of the Bishop property,
who graciously gave me a tour of the house, and to Keith Parker, a former owner,
who filled me in on the early history of the house and assisted me in
obtaining early photographs. Also to Trudy Bell and
Robert Ariail for their assistance in assessing the age of the Clark
telescope. Both are associated with the Antique Telescope
Society, an invaluable resource for this kind of
investigation. Special thanks to Michael Saladyga, librarian for
the AAVSO for finding the observing records of Walter J. Ferris.
Thanks also to John Grula, librarian for the Carnegie Observatories in
Pasadena for finding a copy of Jennie Lasby's 1911 publication with
Walter Adams. Finally, my heart felt appreciation to the most helpful
staff of the Santa Ana History Room of the Santa Ana Public
Library.
Photographs are from El
Don, Del Ano, and El Vivaz (SAC
student publications), Ariel (Santa Ana High School
yearbook), The Santa Ana Register, Western
Woman, The Tustin Historical Society,
Historical Panoramics of Orange County,
and Larry Adkins
-
-
References
- 1. Samuel Armor, "History of Orange County"
Los Angeles: Historic Record Co. 1921, p. 896
- 2. "Tubbs $95,000 Estate Willed", Santa Ana
Register, February 27, 1940, p. 5
- 3. Walter S. Adams and Jennie B. Lasby, "An
Investigation of the Rotation Period of the Sun by Spectroscopic
Methods" Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Institution of Washington,
1911
- 4. Deborah J. Warner and Robert B. Ariail
"Alvan Clark & Sons, Artists in Optics" Richmond, Virginia:
Willmann-Bell, Inc. 1995. pp.73, 137
- 5. Mabel Sterns "Directory of Astronomical
Observatories in the United States" Ann Arbor: J.W. Edwards 1947.
- 6. "Lemon Heights Residences Rank Among the
Southland's Most Attractive" Santa Ana Register, November 18, 1926, p.
9
- 7. Wayne Johnson and Russell
Sipe "The Original Home of the 8"Clark Refractor"
http://www.ocastronomers.org/e-zine/feature_articles/fa_bishop.asp
- 8. ref. 4, Figure 91.
- 9. Lundin account book, 1924, p. 259 ,
Lundin (C.A. Robert, Sr. and Jr.) Papers, University of Texas at Austin
Center for American History
- 10. ref. 4, p. 127
- 11. Bruce Ragan "Telescope In Action for 15
Years", El Don, March 21, 1941
- 12. "Young Astronomers Plan Telescope Trip",
El Don, April 9, 1930
- 13. "Clyde Bishop Dies", Santa Ana Register,
October 31, 1927, p. 1.
- 14. "Young Astronomer[s] Use Bishop
Telescope", El Don, April 30,1930; also ref. 11
- 15. Michael Saladyga, observing archives of
the American Association of Variable Star Observers (private
communication).
- 16. Victor Alleman, private
communication.
- 17. "Jennie Lasby Tessmann", The Western
Woman, Vol. IX #10, 1939
- 18. Victor Alleman's 1941 Del Ano yearbook,
p. 192
- 19. ref. 2.
- 20. "Willed to the Junior College", El Don
August 4, 1940.
- 21. "Astronomers View Rare Transit", El Don,
November 8, 1940
- 22. "Observatory Opens to View Mars", El
Don, October 3, 1941.
- 23. ref. 10.
- 24. Jim Fabian, "Astronomers Make Good Use
of SAC Refractor Telescope", El Don, March 10, 1961.
- 25. Mike Grimshaw, "Man in Moon Has a
Friend", El Don, February 1, 1963.
- 26. "$1.8 Million Building Set for Opening",
El Vivaz (SAC student magazine), Fall 1966.
- 27. ref. 21.
- 28. "Bridge to the Universe" http://www.sac.edu/faculty_staff/academic_progs/math/planetarium/space_ed_center.htm
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- Article reproduced with permission on December
27 2002.
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