David DeVorkin – Senior Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
THE CLASSROOM WILL BE CLOSED FOR THIS EVENT
This lecture will be hosted as a Webinar on Zoom as well as a live stream on our YouTube channel. We encourage you to participate, ask questions, and be a part of the live meeting.
The Smithsonian Institution has been collecting modern astronomical instruments and their components (cameras, spectrographs, etc.) since the 1960s, first at the National Museum of American History (then the Museum of History and Technology) and since the 1970s at the National Air and Space Museum. The Museums have also created several major exhibits and numerous smaller displays based on these instruments. Here I will concentrate on an answer to a question asked by a young visitor: “How Did We Get That?” To answer that question tonight I’ll present some examples of instruments we acquired for the collection, or on loan for displays, mainly for the Explore the Universe Gallery which is now closed after 20+ years. That gallery asked the question: when we create new tools to explore the universe, how has our understanding of the universe changed: from the eye to the telescope, to photography, spectroscopy, beyond the visible spectrum, and apart from the electromagnetic spectrum. I’ll feature stories of how we obtained Herschel’s 20-foot telescope and the Newtonian Cage from the 100-inch telescope (both were loans for the exhibit), as well as the Hubble backup mirror, and its instruments (WFPC2, FOS, and COSTAR, etc). I’ll feature the spectrograph used by Vera Rubin that confirmed the existence of a dark universe and a detector from Japan that played a role in detecting neutrinos from a supernova in 1987.
David DeVorkin is senior curator, emeritus, at the National Air and Space Museum. DeVorkin’s major research interests are in the origins and development of modern astrophysics during the 20th Century and the origins and development of the space sciences from the V-2 to the present. In his 40 years at the Museum has curated galleries and special exhibits using artifact collections at the Smithsonian and elsewhere. He is the author/editor/compiler of many books and articles and has interviewed several hundred astronomers and space scientists.