Harvard astronomer Edward Pickering had ties with CC’s Nob Hill Observatory!
This is the only known photograph of the Nob Hill Observatory, taken about 1905. We believe it was located around 2112 East Uintah, currently “Lunar Park.” (Both “Nob Hill” and “Knob Hill” spellings were in use; CC seems to have used “Nob.”)
Pickering visited Colorado Springs in 1887, accompanied by his wife Lizzie, his brother William, and Anna Palmer Draper. They were here to consider Pikes Peak as a site for an observatory. (See Dava Sobel’s 2016 book The Glass Universe for details.) Frank Loud, CC professor of physics, soon got involved. Here are two newspaper articles about that visit:
In 1903, CC began planning for its own observatory, and in 1904, Loud, Pickering, and three others (Herbert Howe, Edward Giddings, and Otis Johnson) formed The Western Association for Stellar Photography. It’s likely Pickering participated from afar, as his signature does not appear on the early documents. We can see from the By-Laws and Minutes that the instruments at Nob Hill belonged to the Harvard College Observatory.
I wish we knew more about the conversations Loud had with Pickering. I wonder if they talked about having CC women catalog the stars. (Pickering hired many women for this purpose at Harvard, among them Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt.)
What a lovely find. I used to live across the street from Lunar Park in the early 1980s, and there was this weird “buried spaceship” at the top of the park, screened by pine trees, that was a source of incredible mystery. We figured it was a water filtration system or something. Gemini told me about this observatory and brought me here. It seems there is nothing left anymore, all the old infrastructure was removed… but I remember!!