She is tall and slender, and although her glory days are behind her, she still knows how to turn a head. Her posture is impeccable in spite of her age, and she still stands with an aura that commands the room. She waits all day perched above the wood-paneled stage for the sun to recede, for the moon and the stars and the planets to reveal themselves, for her guests to arrive, for the show to begin.

She is the Dearborn telescope, and her story is filled with a rich past of long-distance travel and even a world record. As other refracting telescopes have gone out of operation, the Dearborn telescope, which resides at Northwestern University’s Evanston, Illinois, campus, is in excellent condition. Although she has swapped her original attire, an ornate wood and brass pipe, for a more sensible sheet of white metal that resembles a PVC pipe, she still draws crowds every Friday night to experience a little bit of history and star gazing in the night sky.

The Dearborn telescope in 1944 (Chicago Architectural Photographing Company) and today (Danielle Johnson).

“Telescopes are like funnels for catching star light,” says Michael Smutko, director of the Dearborn Observatory, where the lens has resided since 1887. “The bigger the diameter of the telescope, the more light it can catch per second and funnel it all down to the camera or the viewer.”

The diameter of the lens, after all, earned the telescope a world record, which it held from its creation in 1861 until 1869. Crafted in Massachusetts by Alvan Clark & Sons⁠—who Smutko says are “to lensmakers what Stradivarius is to violins”⁠—its 18.5-inch diameter was two and a half inches wider than any other telescope at the time. 

Today’s telescopes are a different story. The largest refracting telescope (one that uses a lens) resides at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and measures 40 inches, though as of 2018 it is no longer in operation. (It’s still unlikely to be surpassed in diameter, though, because glass any larger would bend under its own weight.) Modern reflecting telescopes (ones that rely on a mirror) further dwarf Dearborn with the largest lens measuring 34.2 feet, over 22 times bigger. 

“There are much better telescopes like… telescopes that they shoot up into space like Hubble,” says Candice Stauffer, a PhD student in physics and astronomy. “So this isn’t doing any more research, but it’s historical. There’s a lot of history behind it.”

The University of Mississippi originally commissioned the lens in 1859, but the Civil War prevented its delivery and the manufacturer put it up for auction. Though Harvard University, which owned a 15-inch lens, wanted to buy it, the Chicago Astronomical Society swooped in and purchased the lens for the original University of Chicago in 1863, paying $18,187 (over $370,000 in today’s money). When the university went bankrupt in 1886, the telescope became the property of the Chicago Astronomical Society. With Northwestern Trustee and Astronomical Society member J.B. Hobbs’ $25,000 donation to build a new observatory at Northwestern, the telescope moved to its new home the following year, and the Dearborn Observatory dedication took place in 1889.

While the observatory initially sat where the Technological Institute is today, it relocated 644 feet southeast in 1939. Some say a team sawed off the building at its base and placed it on log rollers to be pulled by mules, though Dearborn’s webpage notes that 26 men used jacks to transport it to its new location at a top speed of 20 inches per minute. (Perhaps it was a combination of both.) 

“Why it wasn’t easier just to build a new one, I have no idea,” admits Smutko. “It made sense to somebody back then.” At the time, Lake Michigan sat just outside Dearborn’s windows to the East, but Northwestern filled in the lake in the 1960s and constructed numerous buildings, leaving the observatory tucked away on the northern end of campus.

The lens was making discoveries even before the telescope came to Northwestern, though. In 1862, during testing, the lens discovered a companion star to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. “It turned out that that companion star was the first ever observed example of what’s called a white dwarf star, a star that has burned up all of its nuclear fuel and is basically dead and slowly cooling off,” says Smutko. In the early and middle 1900s, astronomers also used the telescope to study double stars, a set of stars that are close enough to appear as one to the naked eye, and variable stars, those whose brightness fluctuates. 

While it is no longer used for significant research today, students in higher level undergraduate and graduate classes still learn how to operate the telescope to record and process their own scientific data. Some also serve as teaching assistants to students in introductory astronomy classes, who have the opportunity to visit the observatory.

“I enjoyed learning about how they used to have to operate those big telescopes versus how they do it now,” says Zach Forbes, a first-year theater major taking a modern cosmology class. “It used to be literally someone sat and cranked and now it’s just a computer. Getting to see it, it’s huge—you wouldn’t expect we would have this huge telescope on campus.”

The observatory is open to the public every Friday night from 9–10 p.m. from October to March and 10–11 p.m. from April to September. Sessions are free as conditioned by the Chicago Astronomical Society when it gave Northwestern ownership of the telescope. However, cloudy skies and Chicago’s notorious light pollution occasionally hinder visibility.

“For our public open houses, one of the important things for me is that people come and look at objects with the telescope with their own eyes,” says Smutko. They could put cameras on the telescope and pictures on computer screens to provide a better view when the weather is bad, but, as Smutko says, “people can stay home and see pictures on their computer screens.”

Over a year, he estimates that 2,000 people come through the observatory between open houses and special events like eclipses. “It’s really fun to see kids come in and get really excited,” says Stauffer, who has worked at observing sessions for nearly a year and a half. “Some grownups and some students—I feel like they have higher expectations. They’re expecting to see a Hubble image or something.”

For the telescope, these sessions are where the show begins, where she shines as bright as the stars she views. The light hum of a motor hits the air, and visitors’ heads tilt upwards to watch her move, slow but steady, searching for the target star like a game of hide and seek in the night sky. After she finds her place, the shiny aluminum ceiling makes a humming noise of its own, slowly retracting and then rotating into position. An attendant calls to let the kids begin climbing the old mobile wooden staircase and peek through the telescope, and the rest of the visitors fall in line behind, awaiting their chance to look through a piece of Northwestern and astronomical history.