Friday night 9-11pm and Saturday night 8-10pm marks the Grand Re-Opening of the restored 20″ refracting telescope! Wesleyan is host to the 8th-largest refracting telescope in the country, but you might not have seen it before since it has been closed for the past 1.5 years while it has been completely disassembled, lovingly restored piece-by-piece, and reassembled into a marvel of old and new astronomical instrumentation. The views are simply spectacular. For more information about the 20″ restoration, check out the website.
As part of the observatory centennial celebration, Dance Professor and former MacArthur (“Genius Grant”) Fellow Eiko Otake will be giving a dance performance called “A Body in the Observatory,” which is free and open to the public. There are performances Friday at 6:30 and 8pm, and Saturday at 4 and 6:30pm. For more information, check out the Center for the Arts page. You can find a video of Professor Otake discussing the performance on our Facebook page.