Dawn of the Space Age

I found in the Boston Globe a lecture at Harvard about space with telescope viewing afterwards. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics sponsors Monthly Observatory Nights. This month was a talk by Jonathan McDowell on the Dawn of the Space Age. He talked about the space programs mostly between 1957 and 1961. With many documents recently declassified by both the Soviet Union and the US, a lot more is now known.

For example the first US spy satellite image was taken Aug 18, 1960; but more interestingly was how it was recovered. It seems the satellite actually developed the film and then dropped a canister down to earth. It releases a parachute and an airplane catches it in mid air to retrieve it!

Then we went to the roof where even through cloudy skies we got a great view of Saturn through the 15-inch telescope known as The Great Refractor. There were also some smaller Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescopes on the roof that offered a similar image as the large telescope. While I found this on the web afterwards, this is roughly what we saw.