Technical drawing of the Anglo-Australian Telescope and its telescope building.

Here's an older telescope technical drawing, the Anglo-Australian Telescope as drawn in 1969.

Unlike the VLT drawings this one would have been done without computer assistance, at a drawing board, with a pencil.

#Astronomy #Astrodon #Telescope #AAT #AngloAustralianTelescope #TechnicalDrawing

Photo of a negative print of the "Ann plate", with stars, circles, raster scans, Lissajous figures and the name "Ann" scattered across the image in black on white.

Photo of a positive version of the "Ann plate", with stars, circles, raster scans, Lissajous figures and the name "Ann" scattered across the image in white on black. The photo is of a page from the symposium proceedings "Celebrating the AAO: Past, Present Future".

Photo of a page from the symposium proceedings "Celebrating the AAO: Past, Present and Future" Text is as follows: 4. On the Ann plate The famous "Ann plate", showing the capabilities of the AAT's computer control system, appear in teh paper by Pat Wallace in this volume. While the photograph is widely remembered, exactly who took it is slightly uncertain, and probably irrelevant. However, for the record: Pat Wallace: I did the experiment and processed the plate, but I think an AAT technician was present in the PF cage for opening and closing the shutter, with me at the telescope controls... I guess it was 1975 [It was 22 December 1974] Peter Gillingham: I don't think it much matters but I'm almost certain Ken Oliver (the first AAT electrician) was the Night Assistant for the night and he was the one in the PF cage. But, as Patrick says, aII he had to do was to open and close the shutter (several times) as Pat commanded. It's also my quite confident recollection that, one or two nights earlier as we (Pat, very likely John Straede, and I) were discussing what should be traced on such a plate and puzzling over what would be a suitable word, Ann Savage, came into the Control Room and, on being acquainted with the topic of conversation, suggested "Ann" right away, pointing out its geometric simplicity [and only two alphabetic characters had to be encoded!].

Photo of a page from the symposium proceedings "Celebrating the AAO: Past, Present & Future". The relevant part of the text is as follows: As I releated at [this] meeting, Californian astronomer Sandra Faber told me before I left Keck that, on seeing the Ann plate image projected at an astronomy instrumentation meeting attended by Pat and Graham Bothwell (at MIT?) she knew that a new era in instrumentation had dawned.

This is the "Ann Plate", a photograph that was taken during the commissioning of the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in 1974 as a demonstration of the capabilities of new telescope.

The AAT was the first large telescope to be completely computer controlled […]

[Original post on aus.social]

Photo of a photo. In this case a A3 print of a long exposure photo of a large telescope building, with star trails circling the south celestial pole behind it.

Photo of an A3 print of a cutaway diagram showing the interior layout of the Anglo-Australian Telescope building.

Photo of a negative print of a photographic plate taken with the Anglo-Australian Telescope. In addition to normal stars (black on a white background, because it's a negative), there are black circles, raster scan patterns, Lissajous figures and the name "Ann" scattered across the image.

With the building move imminent a number of items are being given away to staff, and today that included a pile a good quality A3 photo prints.

As you'd expect there were a bunch of photos of nebulae, galaxies, comets, etc., but I nabbed for myself some […]

[Original post on aus.social]