On the Road: Nashville astronomy, Day 2

On Friday, May 21, I spent the day in Nashville with Rocky Alvey, director of Vanderbilt University’s Dyer Observatory, and with an old friend — Edward Emerson Barnard (1857–1923). E. E. Barnard, as he was universally known, was a great American astronomer and is revered by astronomy enthusiasts as the “last great visual observer” in the history of astronomy. His life bridged the gap between a childhood in Civil War Nashville, when astronomy was still an eyeball-and-telescope exploration as it had been for centuries, through the first phases of the new science of astrophysics.

Barnard’s father died before his son’s birth, so Edward grew up in poverty and lacking nearly any education. By age 9, he became a photographer’s assistant. He loved astronomy and by 1876 bought a 5-inch refractor made by Cooke and Sons in England. Motivated by his love for astronomy and by a need for money, Barnard discovered five comets in the early 1880s; he was awarded enough money from a prize foundation that he purchased a house in Nashville for he and his new bride, Rhoda Calvert, called the “comet house.” Barnard also won a fellowship at Vanderbilt University, and, although he never graduated, won the only honorary degree Vanderbilt ever awarded.

In 1892, Barnard’s astronomical explorations accelerated. He discovered Amalthea, the fifth moon of Jupiter — the last planetary satellite discovered visually. He deduced that a nova produced gaseous emission and therefore was an exploding star. In 1895, Barnard moved to Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, employed by the University of Chicago, and used the 40-inch refractor at Yerkes for various observations as well as cameras to photograph the Milky Way. In doing so, he discovered the nature of dark nebulae and began cataloging them, and they are now named for him in the Barnard Catalog, listing 370 such objects. Observers are familiar with the nearby star in Ophiuchus he studied, “Barnard’s Star,” as well as “Barnard’s Galaxy,” NGC 6822 in Sagittarius.

Barnard’s many other accomplishments will form a focus of some continuing blogs over the coming months. I spent several hours on Friday with Rocky and  Teresa Gray of Vanderbilt’s Special Collections and University Archives. We carefully and meticulously went through much of the Barnard collection, copying images and documents for use in Astronomy magazine. Back at Dyer Observatory, I photographed and copied many additional papers, books, and artifacts belonging to Barnard. It was a dream paradise window into the life and times of one of astronomy’s greatest observers.

And when it was all done, Rocky and I kicked back on the veranda of the house at Dyer, which the celebrated astronomer Carl K. Seyfert built in the early 1950s, and where he and his wife lived before Seyfert’s tragic death in a Nashville car accident in 1960. Seyfert, of course, is well-known to observers for his pioneering studies of high-energy galaxies that came to be known as Seyfert galaxies, and for a famous galaxy group he carefully studied that we now call Seyfert’s Sextet.

What a wonderful day in Nashville, steeped in astronomical history. I ended the day at Dyer’s Star Chamber, a sculptured, artistic rock pile built by Alvey and his friends that harkens back to neolithic observatories of the world and contains a small hole in its ceiling. The hole acts as a camera obscura and projects images of trees, clouds, and sky onto the walls that surround you in the darkened chamber. What a spectacular way to end a day that celebrated nature and sky.

See all of my photos from Nashville, Dyer Observatory, and E. E. Barnard's archives in the Online Reader Gallery.

Related blog

On the Road: Nashville astronomy, Day 1, by David J. Eicher