Trip to Harvard Observatory

It had been wait-and-see all week as we kept an eye on clouds’ rush-hour traffic across the horizon, but finally, on Friday night, the cloud traffic died down, revealing an expanse of stars. At approximately 8:30, we crowded onto the Red Line to visit Harvard, where we were given a private tour of the campus’s stunning observatory by one of its graduate students. Our Abbey Road students were immediately put to work locating stars in the sky, pushing the massive telescope into place, opening and rotating the observatory’s domed roof, and climbing a ladder to peer into the lens to see the tiny dot in the universe that was--Saturn. The image was so sharp, in fact, students reported being able to count the planet’s rings. Once we had done a thorough search of the skies, we sat and chatted with our guide about the future of space travel and what one might do with a degree in astrophysics. After a night of being eyewitnesses to the massive scope of our universe, students return to the dorms (understandably) sleepy.

The magnitude of the telescope