16th May 2026 – Looking back at Open Night
Open Night at the observatory this year was on Saturday the 14th of March and, like last year, we got lucky again with some clear skies. There was a good deal of time spent with a fantastically clear sight of Jupiter – along with other targets.
The ceramic Twin Dome got an audience for the first time as the centrepiece of the Twin Dome exhibition which covered the history of the building and its telescope. We felt that telling the story of the building was overdue.
The exhibition charted the story beginning on Blackford Hill as a new observatory and twin telescope for the Royal observatory and how it cam to be moved to St Andrews in 1979. A certain amount of science was successfully carried out at the new site but that didn’t prevent it coming to a sad end of abandonment (and scrapping of the telescope) in the early 1990s.
Although the telescope story ended badly – literally in a skip – the primary and secondary mirrors were saved and, as it was a twin telescope with spares, we still have four of each. For me these mirrors are a kind of ghost of the old telescope and they need to find a way into a new installation at some point in the future. For just a few short years they recorded the light of variable stars deep into the milky way. For the last 30 years they have remained clamped in the dark in wooden boxes
One of the primary mirrors is in the photo collage above – briefly released from its box.