You're watching OnQ because these foundations care enough about local programing to help pay for it.

The Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the McCune Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation.

Additional funding is made possible by the Pennsylvania Public Television Network and by the Allegheny Regional Asset District, helping OnQ showcase our vibrant arts community.

Nova chemicals provides funding for stories of innovation in our region, and these corporations also support on cue.

Highmark is proud to support OnQ's coverage of the arts, culture, health, public affairs, and civic journalism.

The stories of our region.

Thank you.

The market changes with the wind.

No matter which direction it's going.

The private client group at National City will be there to provide answers.

We understand that trust is something we earn.

The private client group at National City.

And we couldn't do it without you, The members of WQED.

Next OnQ.

It's really an incredible building.

It's all things astronomy.

As we tour the Allegheny Observatory and look into the lives of the people who gave us the stars, that passion to discover was stronger than anything else in his life.

You'll see Pittsburgh connections to the early days of astronomy and meet people learning new things today.

For people who maybe have never looked through a telescope before, the impression we hear a lot is wow!

We celebrate the sky.

In this special edition of OnQ.

And welcome to this special edition of OnQ, I'm Michael Bartley.

For centuries ago, people on earth look to the heavens through the very first telescopes, and what they saw would change the world.

In this episode of OnQ, we commemorate that scientific milestone with much to celebrate right here in Western Pennsylvania.

During the next half hour, we'll talk about local people who made an impact on astronomy and meet some who still do today.

But first, let's visit a landmark where even the casual visitor can't help but be amazed.

Atop this hill, in one of Pittsburgh's most scenic parks, stands a local treasure.

Architecturally, it's probably one of the last great buildings with the marble brass, the masonry construction.

Allegheny Observatory on the city's north side is not only a sight to behold from the outside.

Inside, it contains all kinds of memorabilia dating back to the turn of the 20th century.

It's really an incredible building.

And also to see all the different telescopes that we have here, here about the science and the history that went on here.

Completed in 1912, this building is actually the second Allegheny Observatory.

The first one was located only about two miles away and was owned by a group of wealthy industrialists who called themselves the Allegheny Telescope Association.

They eventually donated the facility to the Western University of Pennsylvania, now called the University of Pittsburgh.

Look at this today.

More than a century later.

Pitts still owns the building where it holds classes and does research.

This telescope was first constructed in 1862, and it's in use constantly.

Lewis Coban oversees the daily operations at the observatory.

He also knows a lot of the history here.

History that includes a man named Samuel Pierpoint Langley.

Langley started here in 1867, and whenever the Allegheny Observatory was handed over to the University of Pittsburgh, and probably some of his greatest achievements as the director were that he was looking at sunspots.

And he did extensive drawings of sunspots, which are actually still found in modern astronomy textbooks.

He also did extensive experiments on powered flight.

Those are just a few of Langley's achievements.

He eventually became head of the Smithsonian in Washington, and Langley Air Force Base in Virginia was also named for him because of his pioneering work in aviation.

The second director of the Allegheny Observatory, James Keeler, proved that the rings of Saturn are actually made up of particulate matter.

And what he did is he used a spectrograph to look across the rings of Saturn, and he found the inside edge of the ring was going much faster than the outside edge of the ring.

And that was discovered right here.

Yes.

Yeah.

I believe it's in the 1890s.

John Brashear is another prominent name at this observatory.

Brashear was an internationally known maker of telescopes, telescopic lenses, and other scientific instruments.

He became director here in 1898.

Also, we have a crypt here where we have some of the people who were the original people to get the observatory running, and it was kind of fashionable at that time period to have something that you loved so much, to have you buried there.

Okay.

Over here we have John Bashir and his wife, Phoebe.

And over here we have James Keeler and his son, Henry Bowman Keeler.

As you can see, neither one for very long lived.

And we have James Keeler's wife, Cora Matthews Keeler.

Pictures of Brashear.

A statue of his likeness and many of his creations can still be found here, including.

This colossal instrument called the Thaw refractor telescope.

It was designed and constructed by Brashears Company.

It's 47ft long.

It weighs in about 8,000 pounds, and it's so finely balanced we can actually push it around.

47ft long.

It has to be one of the biggest telescopes in the country.

Actually, yes, the third largest in the country.

Tell us about the power of this thing.

It's so precise that we can actually measure the width of a dime in the distance from here to Los Angeles.

You could measure the width of a dime from Pittsburgh to LA.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's incredible for such a gigantic telescope.

It has, like, almost a regular eyepiece.

So.

But this can't come down.

You have to move the floor to get me up to look through.

Is that right?

Yeah.

The floor is basically a giant elevator so that we can bring the floor up.

It's just for the convenience of the observer so that you can see through the telescope.

So this comes right to me.

Yeah.

A lot of older observatories used ladders.

In another part of the observatory, under a much smaller dome stands the older 13 inch Fitz Clark refractor telescope.

This is primarily used for the public evening tour program, and we also use it for students for the classes that we have here.

And it's actually very easy to move.

As you can see, it's very finely balanced.

This is basically a refracting telescope, which means that it has a lens at the front, and the lens bends the incoming light down to a focus at the back.

And this telescope is particularly well suited for looking at planets, particularly bright planets and double stars.

Also, Venus is also very nice through this telescope.

A telescope that's almost 150 years old, but a much more modern one is this 16 inch Keeler Memorial Reflector telescope.

It's a very thoroughly modernized telescope.

It's actually one of the newest telescopes in the Allegheny Observatory's arsenal.

Basically, we can control all the functions of the telescope from this computer over here.

And also, we can control the dome, too.

So if we want to take a look at a star, just do a right click on it.

Point at the star Alhena.

If you do, right click on it and click on Slew to Alhena.

And the telescope should go there.

And what's even more amazing is the observatory at night, when the stargazing experience takes on an added dimension of adventure and discovery.

It's generally better to view the stars and planets after the sun goes down.

Solar vs center the other way around.

We want to spend a general redshift.

In this nighttime astronomy class, students, with the help of their instructor, are getting glimpses of constellations they never imagined they'd see.

This is little Orion.

Orion nebula.

From its beginning, Allegheny Observatory has been a place of research and learning.

But as newer technology develops, the role of the observatory will continue to evolve to keep it a vital part of Pittsburgh.

We will switch more to a public outreach facility, but the satellite's.

I can do things a lot better than we can.

We hope to still keep doing what research we can in this area.

If you'd like to visit the observatory, public tours are offered from 8 to 10 at night, April through October.

They're free, but you have to make reservations.

As you just saw, John Brashear was central to the development of the new Allegheny Observatory, but he's also known for many other contributions to astronomy.

Tonya Caruso has more now on John Brashear, the local man who changed our view of the sky.

He had a great love of astronomy, a great love of the night sky.

That passion to discover was stronger than anything else in his life.

And it turns out that passion changed not only the landscape of Pittsburgh, but our knowledge of the skies and the world.

It was 1840 when John Brashear was born in Brownsville, Fayette County.

At the age of nine, something happened that would change his life forever.

Brashears Grandfather took him to look through a telescope that was passing through town.

John Brashear got his first peek at the stars through that telescope.

A peek at the stars, the moon and Saturn.

Images a young Brashear could not get out of his mind.

As he grew older, his love for astronomy grew too.

But he had to make a living.

His reality became working in the mills.

He actually was trained as a millwright.

He worked in a rolling mill.

After his 12 hour shift at the mill, John Brashear would come home, his wife Phoebe would have dinner ready for him, and she already had the steam engine fired up all oiled and ready for him.

Phoebe would fire up the equipment and her husband would work through the night.

In this tiny workshop on Pittsburgh's South Side.

Brashear painstakingly worked for more than two years, grinding his first five inch lens, only to have it fall and break.

But Brashear wasn't discouraged.

He went right back to work, and his persistence eventually paid off.

John Brashear met Samuel Pierpont Langley, who was the head of the Allegheny Observatory, and they became fast friends.

Langley was immediately impressed with Brashears lenses and began to introduce him to every industrialist in town.

Langley introduced Brashear to William Thaw, an industrialist, and then later to Charles Schwab, the head of U.S.

steel, and these men saw the potential in Brashear and his unique science of grinding lenses, making mirrors, making telescopes and other scientific instruments.

Langley, who went on to become the head of the Smithsonian Institution, encouraged John to sort of quit his day job and spend his time full time with his inventions and his telescope building.

And that was a big move for John because it was uncertain times then.

He didn't know if he could support a family doing that.

But with financial backing of Pittsburgh's richest men, especially railroad owner William Thaw, Brashear opened the John A Brashear company back in 1881.

One of his first assignments to build a telescope for the old Allegheny Observatory.

It wasn't long before his telescopes were in demand around the world.

Soon, he found that everyone in the world wanted his lenses and his prisms, and the specialized instrumentation that only he could produce.

Brashears lenses were top quality.

It was.

That's what made a Brashear telescope stand out because of the of the lenses that he made.

Dan Malerbo is the education coordinator of the Buhl Planetarium and Observatory at the Carnegie Science Center.

He proudly shows us one of Brashears telescopes.

The telescope we have here is a four inch refractor made by John Brashear around 1900.

It was made for a Doctor Kennedy, and eventually it wound up being donated here to the old Buhl Science Center in 1972.

So we've preserved it, kept it as a artifact ever since.

Everything you see here was handmade by John Brashear.

All the metal was all fabricated in his workshop.

The lens.

He made, the lens in his workshop, in his house.

So nothing mass produced, nothing mass produced.

John Brashear had his hands in everything, and his telescopes were renowned for their their accuracy.

They were used to help tell the time by tracking the movement of stars and the heavens.

In fact, that's what standardized time in America.

Samuel Langley, using telescopes like the ones Brashear built to tell accurate time, and then selling that time to railroads around the country.

So trains would all be on the same time and not be crashing into each other.

Brashear went on to develop other instruments, and he was involved in education.

Andrew Carnegie came to him and asked him to help set up Carnegie Institute.

So John was involved in everything that had to do with science and technology and innovation in Pittsburgh.

It wasn't long before Brashear traveled the world to visit other observatories.

In 1898, he became acting director of the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh and decided a new building was in order.

He's the one who encouraged the building of a new observatory with the help of many Pittsburgh industrialists.

Brashear nearly single handedly raised the money for the new observatory and upon its completion, took on another important job acting chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania.

Now the University of Pittsburgh.

A civic leader, a man involved in his community, he became known throughout Pittsburgh and most of the country as Uncle John.

John Brashear was a household name in the late 19th and early 20th century.

When he was 75 years old, the nation took a day off to recognize John Brashear as one of the leading lights in American scientific history.

Brashear was garnered with countless accolades.

In 1917, a social services agency on Pittsburgh's South Side was named in his honor.

The Brashear association still exists today.

Its current building even houses a museum for its namesake.

Brashear High School, in the Pittsburgh Public School District is also named in his honor.

John Brashears life sadly came to an end in 1920.

He suffered food poisoning and died at the age of 79.

Thousands turned out for his funeral.

Decades later, the Science Center's Dan Malerbo says the world is still benefiting from Brashears contributions.

Well, there's a connection with this telescope that was built by John Brashear at the turn of the century and a space telescope that we just put it in a space in March.

The name of the space telescope was Kepler, but it was Brashears company, Brashear L.P., that built the lens and the mirror for that space telescope.

That space telescope is going to answer the question, is their life somewhere else in the universe?

And that, everyone agrees, would make John Brashear proud.

John Brashear was one of those amazing men from the 19th century who applied their knowledge and were able to use their hands to make real things and change the world.

If there's one thing in nature that binds us from generation to generation and place to place, it's the night sky.

When you look up at the stars tonight, these are the same constellations, of stars your grandparents looked at when they were your age.

By his making telescopes, he was expanding the the base where people could look through a telescope.

He made astronomy.

He made the sky available for the man in the street.

From John Brashear, a trailblazer to local men and women who can't get enough of the sky.

You know, it is the amateurs who often locate comets, supernovas and new planets that are later studied by the pros.

Here in Pittsburgh, we have one of America's largest groups of amateur astronomers.

You might call them caretakers of the stars.

Spectacular.

Stellar.

The amateur astronomers are the caretakers of the wide view of the sky.

And here in Pittsburgh, a group of citizen scientists has been guarding the heavens for eight decades.

These are members of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh.

Amateur Astronomers Association was founded on June 9th, 1929, in a church basement on the north side of Pittsburgh by five members.

In the space of just 15 years, they grow to 100 members, helped found the original Buhl Planetarium.

It's actually a very good group for people of any level of interest in astronomy, from the beginner or someone who's not even sure up to the expert.

Because there is such a wide range of interest in the club.

And the age has run from small children all the way up to folks who are in their 80s and 90s.

Ed Moss is president of this group, which meets each month at the Carnegie Science Center.

We want to hook you hook, line and sinker into being into astronomy.

And they do it by introducing people to the night sky.

Members hold dozens of star parties all over the area.

It's not unusual to find hundreds gathering to look to the heavens.

Members will have their telescopes set up, so we'll have maybe like 20 telescopes set up outside.

Everyone will point at different things and and the public can come by and just say, what are you looking at?

And you just go from telescope to telescope and look through the different telescopes.

The amateur astronomers also own and operate two observatories, the Wagman in Deer Lakes Township and Mingo in Mingo Creek State Park.

Both are equipped with powerful telescopes, but you don't have to visit those observatories to enjoy the night sky.

Members speak at schools and community groups about all things astronomy.

You'd have to point you telescope to it.

The other thing a couple members do is they go down the south side and drag out their telescopes and let the passers by look through and see the moon and see Saturn and things like that.

If we were just looking at the stars in our backyards or just looking at our stars at the observatory, it would not be of interest to other people.

We share the stars with the community and with children, and it's really important to us to share the enthusiasm with the young people.

And it's just when you see eight year olds and seven year olds get that excited about it, it it makes everything you do worthwhile.

For people who maybe have never looked through a telescope before.

The impression we hear a lot is wow, wow.

When they look through the telescope, because they're really seeing some very interesting things and seeing them for the first time, and it's that first glimpse some people never forget.

Most members have had a lifelong interest in the cosmos.

I can remember going out on my father's shoulders in the 50s and looking for Sputnik, and we just always looked at stars in my family.

10 or 11 years ago, I was reading a lot of science fiction about Mars, and I wanted to know which of the stars was Mars.

So I came to a star party so someone could point it out to me, and I started from zero not knowing anything.

And I had a really great time when I was there.

And and the most memorable thing for me was I asked somebody if they could show me a galaxy and they said, I'll show you two.

And this club really does have an illustrious history.

Members have talked with astronauts in space.

Several have had asteroids named for them.

They even hosted Albert Einstein back in 1934, but still talk about it today.

He asked Leo Scanlon, one of the co-founders of our club, how is it that you were just an amateur, so good at these scientific principles?

Exactly what are you in life?

And Leo said, I'm a plumber.

And he said, oh, that's good.

Can you please tell me where the bathroom is?

But he was very much impressed with our display, and he wrote us a letter which we have a copy of, thanking us for our exhibition of amateur telescope making.

What's especially exciting for the AAAP is that 2009 has been designated the International Year of Astronomy.

On this night at the Carnegie Science Center, members got a sneak preview of a new PBS documentary, 400 years of the telescope, and they got to meet producer and director Kris Koenig.

The pivotal event in my life to to get hooked on astronomy actually happened over a Christmas vacation in 1968, and that was obviously the Apollo eight broadcast that we all remember.

The following morning, I got my first telescope underneath the Christmas tree, and that started my career.

Since then, Chris has produced educational programing, directs an observatory in California, but still considers himself an amateur who just loves the sky.

Looking up at the grandeur of the universe, understanding the distances, seeing the beauty that has been placed by nature for us is something that everybody should enjoy.

And I enjoy sharing it, but I enjoy just occasionally looking up and taking a deep breath and realizing my problems here on earth are nowhere as big as the universe, so I should relax about it.

And remember, you don't have to be a master filmmaker or own an expensive telescope because of groups like the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh.

Anybody can marvel at the stars.

Astronomy is accessible to everybody, and anybody can be a citizen scientist.

And one of the neat things about astronomy is that this is the only field of science where amateurs have contributed actual scientific research.

And another thing is sort of like low budget.

You can go out and you can do astronomy on your way outside, taking the garbage out, you know, on your way to work early in the morning.

You can do astronomy.

You don't need a $10,000 telescope.

I think we all wonder about what's in the sky, why we're here, what the universe is made of.

And this is a good place to answer the questions.

And it's such great fun to observe the always changing sky and the wonderful things that go on.

Astronomy is a branch of science that keeps growing as the instruments become more sophisticated, the sky becomes more accessible, and many stargazers say it's only a matter of time before we find life outside our solar system.

And that's it for this edition of OnQ.

For the entire staff, I'm Michael Bartley.

Thanks for watching.