Filmed April 2015


During the late 1800s, the 36-inch reflector of English amateur astronomer Andrew
Common made its way from a London backyard to a Yorkshire estate and ultimately to a
mountaintop observatory in California. This little-known telescope, built in 1879 and still
operating today, revolutionized celestial photography and proved to astronomers that the
future of cosmic discovery lay in the camera, not the human eye.

Who is Alan Hirshfeld?

DR. ALAN HIRSHFELD Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and an Associate of the Harvard College Observatory. Hirshfeld has written books on the history of science including Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos, which chronicles the human stories involved in the centuries-long quest to measure the first distance to a star, and most recently, Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe. He is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to magazines on the theme of scientific discovery, exploration, and national security. He received his undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Princeton University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale University in 1978.

NEAF Talks brings you the best from the annual NEAF Astronomy & Space conference which is held just outside of New York City at the RCC campus of the State University of New York. The Northeast Astronomy Forum is in its 25th year and is a world renowned symposium which annually searches the globe for the most relevant personalities who are making space, science and astronomy history today. Now through NEAF Talks online, these outstanding lectures are available to classrooms, universities, professionals and the world- free of charge. Visit RocklandAstronomy.com\NEAF for more information or to learn how to see NEAF live.
NEAF Talks- supporting science and astronomy education for a quarter century, now free to the world via the web.

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