This photo of the 72 -inch Lord Red Telescope was taken in 2022. Credit: Dixond/Wikimedia Commons
William Parsons, 3rd Count of Rosse, was born on the date on which I am publishing this article (June 17) back in 1800, in York, England. Astronomes know him as the person who built (ok, supervised the construction) and used the largest telescope in the nineteenth century. It was not exceeded at the beginning until the 100 -inch Hooker telescope is built at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1917.
Bigger eye on the sky
Nicknamed the “Leviatano di Parsonstown”, its main mirror (made of a mirror-a copper mixture of two thirds and a third of tin) measured 72 inches. He installed him at the Birr Castello, who was in Parsonstown. In fact, Parsons put two mirrors on the ground so that one could be used in the telescope while the other was reused. The Speculum quickly obscures, so there was a continuous need to do it.
The telescope was a mechanical wonder in which Lord Rosso incorporated a lot of creative thinking. He began to build it in 1842 and ended it three years later. At the end, he replaced the 36 -inch reflector he was using. The Leviathan was balanced so well that, despite weighed 16 tons, two men could easily indicate it anywhere in the sky.
Deserving observations
Lord Rosse used the Leviathan to study nebulae. Today, that word means “a cloud of cosmic gas that emits, reflects or absorbing the light”. But at the time of Parsons, it meant “any unsolvable object visible through a telescope”. This included galaxies.
One of the greatest discoveries of Lord Russian was the spiral structure of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). He also made a sketch of a nebula in the bull’s constellation. Due to the shape it designed, we still refer to it as the crab nebula (M1).
Parsonstown’s Leviathan remained in use until 1890. The restoration of this giant tool was completed in 1997.
