The beginning
From 1983 to 1992 the Twin Dome at the Observatory was the home of the Twin Photometric Telescope – two 40 cm telescopes on a mount, a telescope tailor-made for high-precision photometric monitoring with one telescope for the variable star and one for a reference star. The image on the left shows the Twin Dome in 1983, with the fully refurbished telescope and two photometers attached to the back. Since the late 1990s, the Twin Dome has been an empty shell, passed by thousands of visitors on their way to its neighbour, the James Gregory Telescope. Beginning in 2018 however, the decades of obscurity have finally come to an end. The building is now repurposed as the Twin Dome Project, in a collaboration between artist Tim Fitzpatrick and astronomers and engineers at the School of Physics & Astronomy. We are turning the old observatory of the 1980s into a home of art and science for the 21st century. The Twin Dome Blog charts that story from the beginning.
