The site includes two separate buildings. The one pictured above, dated 1873, contains a 16-inch refractor built in 1904. The other building contains, according to the staff, the oldest working telescope in the western hemisphere, installed in 1843 (though likely built a year or two before). A local astronomy club still uses it and I attended an open house and had the privilege of manipulating the large scope myself within its dome. To get the entire scope into a picture, I had to literally lie down on the floor.
It's a beautiful wooden telescope that now doesn't have the power of many much smaller modern telescopes, but historically and visually it still stuns. One of the guides told me that it does resolve Saturn's rings, with some of the inner rings definable, including their inner planetary separation. It also shows a certain degree of color differences on the planet itself. I had never manipulated a telescope that large before, nor before ever rotated an observatory dome, accomplished with a hand crank on the wall.
The 1873 building also contained a museum of astronomy, including a replica of Galileo's telescope, an astrolabe, quadrant, and a history of the observatory itself. John Quincy Adams, apparently in one of his final public appearances, laid the cornerstone for the building's predecessor on another Cincinnati hilltop, but the stone was later moved to the 1873 building, where it still sits. When I attended the open house, the organization had a room full of books that they gave away. "All books are free!' a man in a Cincinnati Observatory shirt said more than once. I left with maybe 5 books, the most I could carry at the time. The grounds included maybe a few dozen people with their gear and scopes of all kinds. I also spoke with a high school teacher in the area who had set up a muon detector. Everyone was extremely friendly and, if I lived in the area, I would definitely sign up and volunteer with this organization.
So why didn't it work out? You can probably guess. I took a daytime tour and usually they do a solar viewing with the 1904 telescope, but it was raining. The tour guide told me to come back for the open house, which I did, but very heavy clouds blotted out everything except low-flying planes. So, though I went twice, I never actually saw anything through either scope, sadly. The weather reigns over this hobby.
Still, I'm extremely glad that I went and I hope to return sometime for another try. If you're ever in the Cincinnati area, definitely check this site out. For me, it will remain one of the highlights of the trip.
