Comments on the Yerkes Virtual Tour.

23 May 1999, Duane Cutting

Living in Lake Geneva I have made numerous trips thru the Observatory As a youngster, back in the twenties, I once diddled with lens grinding and got advice from one of the residents. Since lens grinding was a fine art, and the observatory did much of it, I think this could be incorporated in a tour. There must be a quantity of 'old stuff' barrels, blanks, and pine tar lying around the grounds someplace. It's been great having a prestigious place so close.

28 Mar 1999, Francis Howard

Enjoyed your web site, it was very well done and the pictures were clear. Also enjoyed the detailed history of Yerkes. I never could find this much information in a library. I knew about Yerkes since a teenager with a telescope and an interest in astronomy, so I just typed in "Yerkes Observatory" to find it. One of these days while visiting family in Indiana, I am going to get up to take a tour of Yerkes.

6 Mar 1999, Cathy Fix

my fifth grade daughter had to make an alphabet book for space and had the luck of getting r thru z. Luckily we found your Yerkes Observatory thru the internet, and utilized the pictures and information for her booklet. Thank you so much for having this information readily available for the students to use and we hope to visit someday as it looks beautiful, a magnificient setting!!

10 Feb 1999, Tom Weil

Just a note to let you know how impressive your web site is. My first visit to Yerkes was about 30 years ago as a teenager I have been back about 4 more times over the years, but your web site has motivated me to organize our "Indian Princess" tribe to make a day of it. Yerkes remains a well kept secret. Thank you again...Tom Weil

14 Jan 1999, Gaetan Chevalier

I would like to congratulate you for your very good and informative web site about Yerkes Observatory. The tour of the observatory is very interesting and the photos ad to the beauty of the site. Continue you great work.

11 Jan 1999, Kate Harter

This is a great site you have. Right now our science class at my middle school is studying Lenses, Telescopes, and mirrors. I was very interested at the infromation you have here. I think something that would make it even better are pictures of things the telescopes have seen, like the moon or stars or the Milky Way, and more pictures of the telescope and how it works (lenses, and mirrors etc.) Otherwise your site is perfect. I thought the best part of the virtual tour was that you could click on any dome you want and automatically get information on it! Maybe my class will be able to take the REAL tour someday.

9 Sep 98, Reyolando M. Brasil

I really enjoyed your tour. Hope I can do it personnally some day. Reyolando Brasil, Associate Professor, Polytechnical School, University of Sao Paulo, BRAZIL

7 Sep 98, Joyce Tikalsky

The site is fabulous, fascinating, and exciting because of its rich content. You have really made a great contribution to the Internet.

25 Jun 98, Douglas Rogers

I am a 17 year old guy with a HUGE interest in astronomy and everything related to the universe that we live in. Having grown up in southern WI, I have seen the observatory from a distance for years. After touring your complex, my interest was set ablaze This site is a wonderful resorce for those of us that have an interest in the history of this wonderful local landmark. Thanks for offering this information to at least one home town astronomy nut!

15 May 98, jason schwager

Love your virtual tour of Yerkes. I'll be back to see more, learn more, and tell others.

14 Apr 98, Thomas M. Clayton

Cool site! I stumbled on it by accident while searching for something else. You have done a great job of organization.
When I was a junior high school student, I was lucky enough to have a personal tour of the observatory. I remember looking at all kinds of stars and planets through the 40-inch refractor well into the early morning hours. It was so exciting! And for a kid in junior high school, the enormous dome and telescope was breathtaking.
I also remember walking out across the roof to check out one of the other reflector 'scopes as well. Stumbling across your page brought back really neat memories. I'm all grown up now, but still remember that night of peering into the heaven. Thanks for the memories!

2 Apr 98, Mark Curcio

I think your site is "out of this world". Absolutely wonderful photographs. Well thought out and informative. It's really a pleasure finding a site like yours.
I have always had more than a passing interest in Astronomy and was surfing the net in search of interesting observatory sites when I came upon yours. It just so happens that I am planning a cycling trip to southern WI this coming weekend and have now made plans to visit your wonderful observatory.
Keep up the outstanding work, there really are people out here who are enjoying it!!!!
Thank you!!

12 Feb 98, Dan Prysby

Pleased to see a well organized web site that gets right to the meat - no sub-sub-menus to plod thru. I have toured Yerkes before - good tour. I have part time access to a viewing site near Lake Geneva for my small 4" Meade SC.

4 Feb 98, Andy J Schroeder

I must say how much I loved your observatory, the first time I was there was to view Hale-Bopp and the first time I ever saw Yerkes, I was hooked, I mean I was so mesmerized by what I saw, from the carvings on the outside of the building, to seeing Hale-Bopp itself. I hope to see this prestigeous Observatory again in the future. And again I extend my warmest thank-you's to everone at Yerkes Observatory!
Keep looking up, Andy J Schroeder, AGE 14

1 Nov 97, Guillermo Vargas

Happy 100 Aniversary to all present and absent fantastic people that is the most important part of that FANTASTIC OBSERVATORY !!
Also, thank you for allowing us to take a look inside your installations trough your great Web page. Really thank you for sharing with us what you have.
I also anjoyed very much the great article published in the November 1997 issue of Astronomy. (I just digitized the great photo that appear in page 55 and put it as a wallpaper in my PC ..... Looks great !!)
I hope to be lucky enough to visit Yerkes very soon, and feel the past and present spirit of such an incredible place !!
I wish to Yerkes, his people and his achievements, a lot more of hundreds anniversaries.
Hope to see you soon Yerkes !!
My Best Regards
Guillermo Vargas, Guadalajara, Jalisco. Mexico

30 Sep 97, Terri Grueneich

I have to tell you that whoever constructed and maintains this site did and does a wonderful job. The picture of my grandmother's late husband, Bill Morgan, brought tears to my eyes. When I was a little girl, I spent hours with him in his office coloring with a set of 64 Crayolas with the sharpener in the box while he worked and marked his "sun calendar" on the floor. He was an incredible man and I am so happy that his many accomplishments have been and are still being recognized. As often as I can, I still go to Delavan to visit my grandmother and the "Obs" to see the July 4th fireworks from the balcony of the "big dome" as it was once a favorite pastime of his and my grandmother's. Again, congratulations on a job very well done.

13 Sep 97, Bob Rondeau

The best one-word description I could find after visiting your site is: "Wow!" I found it via APOD for September 13, 1997.
Thank you, whoever you are, for including architectural detail. The building itself truly reflects the significance of the 40-inch as a "portal" to other worlds. As a school principal, I will be steering the youngsters to your site as an example of how to present an already fascinating subject in an enriching and informative manner.
>From a personal viewpoint, may I suggest, as others have, that you post some "top ten" photos taken through the 40-inch? Perhaps those that have ground-breaking or historical value would be a great treat! Thank you so much.

5 Sep 97, Lauren Greco

I like the telescope.

17 Aug 97, Harley W. Parker

Thanks for such an informative page on Yerkes Obs. I want to visit you soon from my home here in Milwaukee. Thanks

27 Jul 97, Joshua G. Harper

I am a piano tuner from Fargo, North Dakota. The weekend of the 25th of July I tuned and repaired the Mason & Hamlin in the Morgan house. I was hired by Ruth Ulvog, step daughter Dr. Morgan, to recondition the piano for Ed. Ed gave me a wonderful tour of the facility! The observatory is truly a national treasure.
Please add additional "behind the scene" info if you have time.

27 Jul 97, Katherine

Hi I am 11 years old and I would just like to say, YERKES ROCKS!!!! I have taken your real tour twice and been to your website countless times. I LOVE the big telescope. When I grow up, I am going to be an astronomer.

20 Jul 97, Susan L. Wendlandt

Hi! I really enjoyed finding all this information on the observatory but very few teachers in the wisconsin school system seem to know of its existance. [...] I'm thrilled by my discovery of your observatory because I was born and raised in Chicago. I will do my best to spread the word to our local teachers in central WI.

14 Jul 97, Dusten Galbraith

Dear Yerkes,
As a youngster in the 1960's I went to summer camp in Williams Bay. Yerkes was visable from the campgrounds, but I never got the chance to visit.
This weekend my family and I will be in the area and I told my wife the ONE!! thing I have to do is visit Yerkes.
I'm looking forward to achieving a 30+ year dream.
Thanks for being there and being open to the public.
Dusten Galbraith

28 Jun 97, Gayle Olson

I really enjoyed the virtual tour on your website and have added it to The Mining Company - Science & Nature for Kids, this weeks feature. I try to find the best for kids and search through hundreds of sites to find pages with the "right stuff".
The article should be online by later today, click on current feature on the menu at the left side of the screen.
Regards, Gayle Olson, Your Guide for Science & Nature for Kids, http://kidscience.miningco.com

11 Jun 97, Michael Tucker

[I] visited Yerkes with the Antique Telescope Society. [I'm] giving [a] talk at the Berks County Club [soon], [and the] info found on this web site will be included in my talk. Great Job! Thanks, Mike Tucker, President, Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers

20 May 97, Robert H. Stewart

I am the past president, and current vice president of the Tidewater Community College Astronomical Society. Our club has a number of non student members, but caters to the community college astronomy student. I am always on the lookout for ways to help students learn and visulize aspects relating to astronomy. I found your site while 'surfing' the observatory web sites as listed in 'Astronomy' magazine. this is the first that has excellent learning aids for refraction and reflection. I have copied down the entire discriptions. That coupled with the rest of the virtual tour can only be described as AWESOME. I have visited the Leander-McCormick Observatory at UVa, and had the pleasure of viewing Jupiter thru the 26" Clark refractor at the USNO in Wash. D.C.(during comet crash week in 1994). I hope to add views of Jupiter thru your "little" refractor at some point in my life. This is with out a doubt an excellent web site. You will go on my bookmark list. Thank you very much for your efforts.
P.S. I also belong to the International occultation Timing Association, doing research on lunar motion and stellar astrometry. Again, thanks for the excellent site.

27 Apr 97, John Gills

I have been looking at Yerkes for over 40 years when boating on Lake Geneva and Visiting my grandparents in East Troy and Elkhorn. The only time my wife and I made it to the observatory it was closed. I have really enjoyed this look at what you're up to! Thanks!

27 Mar 97, Richard Lane

Nice set of pages! I enjoyed the virtual tour and I hope one day to make the real tour. I teach Fine Art Photography at Texas Christian University in Ft.Worth,Tx. and recently purchased a set of glass lantern slides which contained an intersting image....It was the Moorehouse comet taken at the Yerkes in 1904. Since I'm also interested in astronomy I was thrilled to luck into this image. I thought that you'd be interested to know that some of your Astro photos are still out there in the world.

2 Mar 97, Edgar H. Adcock, Jr.

Thanks for the excellent virtual tour of the Yerkes Observatory. A friend and I happened upon the building today while exploring the area (we're new here, having moved from NJ). We wandered around the grounds a little, and made some photographs, wishing we had known about the Saturday visiting hours. (now we do know about them. . .so we'll see you one Saturday)
Taking this tour was enormously informative and very enjoyable! Thanks for taking the time to provide it.

14 Feb 97, Duane A. Stillings

I am planning a trip to Yerkes in February. Your web site provided the necessary information and, more importantly, added a bit of flavor to the anticipation of the visit. Thank you.

21 Nov 96, Michael A. Bailey

I grew up around the observatory as a young boy. My father was on staff there as an electrician. I even lived on the ground for three years. Yerkes Observatory and many members of it's staff influenced me a great deal. This 9-14 year old, and rather grubby, boy spent countless hours wandering around the building, watching my father work in the domes, and pestering the faculty. ;) I'm now a 22 yo software developer, consultant, and run an ISP. It was wonderful being able to see it again.

4 Sep 96, Rolando M. Branly

I spent a summer and a bit more as an undergrad at Yerkes.... It was an experience that transformed my life... I am now an assistant professor of astronomy at Broward Community College. [...] You can be sure that the spirit of Yerkes Observatory lives in all of my clases here in Florida. When we go to the Planetarium we always take a virtual tour of the South Pole's night sky... and I talk about the activities at CARA ....

2 Sep 96, Dick Van EffenD

I really enjoyed the virtual tour. Reminded me of the time several years ago when Rich Kron and I spent a couple hours actually looking through the 40-inch. We looked at Saturn (spectacular), Uranus, Neptune, and the FULL moon (yes, that's how we got time on the scope!) The computer wasn't working that night, so we had to use the setting circles. Got to wrestle with the scope (you learn the meaning of inertia).
By the way, I hear that Yerkes is in the movie "Chain Reaction." I'll catch it on video.

28 May 96, Joe Porter

Fantastic!!!!!!
I just took your tour and the photographs were the best in sharpness and color I have ever seen on the net. I enjoyed the tour so much went back many times. I will be coming to the National Astronomical League convention in July and Yerkes Observatory is on the program. After seeing your tour I am very anxious to come there for a visit and see it all in person. The architecture, the 40 inch refractor are awesome to say the least. I can't find words to describe how much I enjoyed your site. I will spend many hours here looking around and also the University of Chicago.
Thanks again for this beautiful site. Words cannot do it justice.

14 Feb 96, Key Mueller

Hello! I am a former resident of Williams Bay. I miss the village very much and it was extremely nice to find something on the internet from the homeland! I fondly remember taking many tours (some behind the scenes) of the grounds and facilities. <...>

5 Dec 95, Bettina Donaghy

This is a wonderful site! I read about it in the Oct. issue of the U of C Magazine, and have only just now had a chance to visit. I loved all the photos (especially the ones from the archives), and the easy-going text. Next stop: a drive out to Williams Bay for a real tour.

Oct 95 Chicago Alumni Magazine

(Blurb online too!)

In August, the University astronomy & astrophysics department officially launched its Yerkes Observatory virtual tour. The tour thoroughly examines the 98-year-old facility, located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, as both an architectural and scientific marvel.

Highlights: The Web page takes an intimate look at the ornate details of the Henry Ives Cobb-designed building, including a caricature of William Rainey Harper carved into one pillar and a rare close-up of one of the roof's "celestial spheres." A separate home-page link is devoted to what is still the world's largest refracting telescope: "The lens itself is 40 inches across, and the tube is 63 feet long. This is a big telescope!"

8 Sep 95, Mike Richter

Thanks for taking me back to a great summer in 1958. I had a Research Assistantship there and lived in a tent at the van Biesbroecks'. (Sorry about the spelling; it's from memory.) FYI: While I got to do a lot of observing and learned to program Dr. Strand's promised IBM 650 (at NU, of course), a high point was quite a lot of photography. (I set up the lab for Kuiper's Photographic Atlas of the Moon, among other things.) I still have prints from that era, a few of which might belong in your collection. My favorite is the one of the splintered floor from its collapse. No pictures of Carl Sagan's first wife wiping the dust from the 40" objective, though; my camera was in my tent. May I suggest that you find a way to get Chandra's eclipse photo onto the INet. To my knowledge, the only ovate sun ever photographed in the name of science.

5 Sep 95, Joe Tenn

I wish all observatories had as much history on their pages as Yerkes.

8 Aug 95, Jan Wee

Hi! I am a friend of Al Harper's, as well as a teacher/consultant working on the Live From the Stratosphere Project. I will be coming to Yerkes next week and just for fun.... decided to see if you have a web page. Wow.... it iis really nice! I love all the graphics and the detailed info on the background of Yerkes. I plan to use this page tomorrow in a demo to teachers who are coming in for an Internet workshop. I was wondering if yyou plan to put some of pictures of celestial objects taken at Yerkes on this site/web page? I think it would be great to see some of the images that I have seen on a previous visit to Yerkes. I think your web site is excellent. Thanks for the virtual tour! :-)

1 Aug 95, Dinos Gonatas

Hi, It was quite interesting looking at your virtual tour of Yerkes. I used to be a graduate student (I spent a lot of 1985-87 there), and although Yerkes was (and probably still is) quite isolated, I had quite a few summer and fall evenings there that I still remember. The sunsets as seen from the balcony on the main dome are quite spectacular. Since I live and work in New Jersey now (at Exxon's corporate research & development labs), and don't have quite the same environment. OK, OK, not all of new Jersey is like the NJ turnpike, but still... It has been more than 5 years since I visited Yerkes, so I appreciate your virtual tour as it reminds me of what living there was like.

16 May 95, Mike Robinson

I enjoyed browsing your network of Web pages during a mind-refreshing break from work. I've always been interested in Yerkes since I first developed an interest in Astronomy during grammer school (that was in the 50's!). I'm a member of the Eastbay Astronomical Society in Oakland, CA, which meets at Chabot Observatory, a public education institution, where they have a 20" Brashears refractor and a 9" Clark refractor (you can ask John Briggs if I got those names and numbers correct). Keep up the good work. Maybe I'll come and visit you up there sometime (possibly this October!).

24 Apr 95, Raymond Wishner

I'm 67 years young. As a child in the 30's my family used to stay at various camps on Lake Geneva (ie the YMCA camp). When I saw Yerkes Observatory on a list of observatories derived from Yahoo under a search for telescopes, I couldn't help remembering the excitement of our annual visit to Yerkes. I will show my friends your tour. Actually I'm a retired computer programmer and was trying to follow up on a multi-mirrored observatory that was supposed to be built in Hawaii. But as of now have not been able to find out any current information. The last I heard of it its construction had advanced very far. Is it successful? Will it be successful? In this search for info I found out that the multi-mirrored telescope in Arizona is being converted to a large single mirrored one. (Actually larger that Palomar's 200 inches.) Thank you for letting me visit Yerkes again.

4 Apr 95, Joe Tenn

I love it. I am very interested in the history, and it is also pleasing to see one of our SSU graduates, Tom McMahon, in one of the pictures. (Hi, Tom!) I will immediately insert appropriate references to the Yerkes history page in my Bruce medalists pages (http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/). I found the tour via Wolfgang Dick's wonderful History of Astronomy pages in Berlin (http://aibn55.astro.uni-bonn.de:8000/~pbrosche/astoria.html). Keep up the good work. Joe

30 Mar 95, Sandy Johnson

This is great! I drove by Yerkes about two weeks ago and wanted to know more about it. So I clicked into the University of Chicago homepage and then found this. It was exactly what I was looking for, I really wanted to know if it was open for tours, etc. and I really learned a lot. Thanks for the information!

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Content originally generated in March 1995.
This file was last modified on 27 May 1999.